A connector lets Claude reach outside the conversation and act in another tool when you ask. As of today, You can now find the Substrate Claim Status Agent in Claude's connector directory, connect your Substrate account, and ask Claude for the status of a claim in plain English.
The connector is our Claim Status MCP listed where Claude users already look for tools. Nothing is a lite version: it is the same claim status engine, covering 3,500+ payers across EDI, portals and direct APIs, that our agents run for enterprise customers.
What you can ask Claude to do
Check a single claim. Give your assistant the payer, patient, member ID, billing NPI and service date, and it starts an inquiry. You get back an operation ID to follow.
Let the payer ask for what it needs. If a payer wants one more field, the response comes back as requires_input, saying exactly which one. Supply it, resubmit, and the same inquiry carries on. This helps solve cases where the payer doesn't specify that a specific field is required (or you don't know that a specific field is required for that payer).
Poll to an answer. claim_status_get returns the current state until the work stops being working. The final outcome is one of claim_found, claim_not_found or payer_rejected, or unable_to_process when there is no supported route.
Retry without double work. Every inquiry carries an idempotency key, so a retry after a timeout never creates a duplicate. This helps in case payers are down.
Work a list. Because it is a tool, an agent can walk a short aged-AR worklist for you: check each claim, then summarize which were found, which were rejected and which need a human.
If you're already working your AR Backlog using Claude or ChatGPT, this one's for you. You can set up your portals (eg Availity or UHC) in the Substrate dashboard, and the MCP will trigger the Substrate Claim Status Agent to log in and check claim status on your behalf.
The problems it solves
- Tab-switching. Status lives in dozens of payer portals. Now you ask where you already work.
- Typing the same thing repeatedly. Claude fills the payer, NPI and date fields from what you give it, and the connector asks for only what is missing.
- Analysts without engineering. No API integration or code. If you can write a sentence, you can run a status check. Before you had to be an enterprise RCM team on Substrate to use this. Now, an independent single provider practice can do the same.
- Trust in the answer. Results are normalized into a small set of outcomes, so you are not interpreting five payer dialects.
How to get started.
This one is the toolset we use ourselves: the same claim_status and claim_status_get tools, the same payer routing, the same learned strategies behind our enterprise deployments.
To connect: open the connector in Claude's directory, choose Connect, sign in to Substrate, pick your account and approve the claim_status:submit and claim_status:read scopes. If you don't have a Substrate account yet, request access here. The free Payer MCP needs no account at all.
Using it safely
Claim status involves patient information, so use the connector only with an approved Substrate account and a Claude plan configured for PHI under your agreements. We send only the minimum fields needed to payers and clearinghouses, our gateway doesn't store request or response bodies, and access is checked against your account every time. Start with synthetic data if you want to try it before production.
This is the first of our tools in Claude. Eligibility, payer portal and appeals tools are in development. Tell us which you want first.
