Claude can now read your athenahealth medical records

What if you could ask an AI about your own test results and medications without digging through your records yourself? Some US patients now can, provided they have an athenahealth account with their medical record data. On November 2, 2026, the health company athenahealth launched athenaPatient MCP, which connects a patient's official medical record data to Anthropic's AI assistant Claude.

What's new

athenaPatient MCP is a server-based solution built on the open Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short. You can think of MCP as a shared power outlet that lets an AI assistant connect to other services in a controlled way.

In practice, this means a patient can connect their health data from athenahealth to Claude and ask questions in plain language. The feature is enabled under settings in the Claude account. According to athenahealth, Claude can access lab results, vital signs, medications, health conditions, vaccinations, visit history, diagnostic reports, allergies, procedures and care plans.

The move is not entirely new: athenahealth already announced an MCP server for patients at the HIMSS conference in March 2026. At the time, it was described as an upcoming preview.

What's smart

The patient is in control. You log in with your existing athenahealth credentials, decide for yourself which information is available, and can revoke access at any time.

According to HIT Consultant, data is retrieved as needed when you ask a question, rather than the entire record being loaded into Claude in advance. The same source reports that the solution comes with commitments of no data storage, that patient data is not used to train models, and that session data is kept separate. Those points are not in the press release itself.

Paul Brient, chief product and operations officer at athenahealth, says: "It's about helping patients get value from their own health data."

Cheaper or better?

The price of the solution itself has not been disclosed. It is available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers, so you need a paid Claude subscription. What those subscriptions cost is not stated in the sources.

A comparison with competing solutions has not been provided either. Interest in the area is high, however: HIT Consultant cites a Pew survey from August 2026, according to which 34 percent of American adults have used AI assistants for health purposes.

What it's good for

The solution suits patients who want to better understand their own data: what a lab result means, which medications they are on, or what a report from their last visit said. It can also help make sense of a long visit history or prepare questions for the doctor.

For Danish readers, however, there is nothing to take advantage of right now. The announcement mentions only the US, and nothing has been said about availability in Denmark or the rest of the EU.

It is also not a replacement for a doctor or nurse, but a tool for getting more out of the information you already have a right to see.