Every revenue cycle team has the same small problem a hundred times a day: which payer is this, and how do I verify benefits or check a claim status with them? The name on the claim says "CHLIC", the card says Cigna, the clearinghouse wants a payer ID, and who even knows what the payer's portal is a separate login entirely.
Many RCM teams are also already using popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. So today we're releasing the Substrate Payer MCP, a free, public, read-only MCP server that lets any AI assistant look up healthcare payers and the routes that work. There's no signup required, and no API key or PHI involved -- point your agent at https://mcp.substrateai.com/payers and ask.
What you can do with it
The server has one tool, search_for_payer. Some things you can ask:
Resolve an identity. "Which payer matches payer ID 62308?" or "Find the payer matching the alias CHLIC and link me to its canonical profile." It searches names, aliases, payer IDs, employer IDs, programs, groups and vendor IDs, so messy inputs still land on the right payer.
Find the right route. "Find Cigna and summarize its published claim-status and eligibility routes." Filter by capability (claim status, eligibility, ECS, portal, phone, appeals) to see which payers support a 276/277 and which are portal-only.
Narrow by geography and line of business. "Find Blue Cross payer endpoints in California with a published 276/277 route." Filter by state, line of business, program code or network family (BCBS, Cigna).
Check whether a route is worth trying. "Compare the public answering, reliability and recency signals for the top Centene matches." Each route carries a public label (supported, flaky, unsupported, unproven) and a recent-answering signal. This allows you distinguish between working routes and ones that merely exist. Very frequently billers and RCM teams bang their heads against a wall when a payer says some route works or some transaction is supported, and in reality there's no way to get successful responses from it.
What this solves
- Payer name chaos. Aliases, parent groups and trading-partner IDs can all point at the same entity. This MCP enables you to submit any name, and it will help resolve the right payer ID options for it
- Wasted attempts. You pay for every clearinghouse request. Now you can know if (for example a 276/277 request) has ever worked for a given payer before spending on it.
- Agents that guess. Look up payer specific answers instead of guessing.
- Onboarding new payers. You can build a workflow or automation for an unfamiliar payer by starting with what transactions it supports.
Anyone can use it
The payer directory behind this server is the same reference data our own agents lean on when they run claim status, eligibility and appeals for enterprise customers. We are exposing the public discovery layer, not a toy version of it.
Setup is one line in most clients:
claude mcp add --transport http substrate-payers https://mcp.substrateai.com/payers
In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop, go to Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector, name it "Substrate Payer Search" and paste the URL. Codex, Cursor, VS Code and any Streamable HTTP client work too; leave authentication unset. Full instructions are in the docs.
What this isn't
This MCP provides public reference data only. It never takes patient information, and published=false means we haven't published a route, not that a payer can never support it. We'd like to know what's missing. If there is a payer detail you want to see, reach out. More to come.
