Medicaid chatbot answers 10,000 member questions; officials stress guardrails and human review

Antoinette Taranto, chief customer officer for the department, described a narrow, informational conversational assistant added to the Health First Colorado mobile app to help members find plain‑language answers to common Medicaid questions.

"The role of AI is intentionally narrow," Taranto said. "This is just an informational tool. It does not determine eligibility, approve or deny services or coverage, or make clinical decisions." She reported members have asked roughly 10,000 questions, satisfaction is about 72% and reported accuracy about 89%, and that the assistant answered about 62% of questions without directing members elsewhere.

Members pressed on the risk of confident but incorrect answers. Taranto said the assistant is constrained to a library of about 70 approved Health First Colorado resources; when the model cannot find an answer, it refers the user to the member contact center. She also said the system warns members not to enter protected health information and that a business‑associate agreement is in place with the platform vendor.

The committee asked for continued monitoring and for written follow‑up on any PHI or training‑data safeguards; staff said they would provide additional documentation.