Medical FairBill is an automated medical bill–review tool that uses AI to compare your itemized bill to your medical record. It detects potential errors, such as duplicate charges, undocumented services, or inappropriate coding. It then helps you generate a dispute letter tailored to your situation.

Medical FairBill exists because the medical billing system is riddled with errors and deeply confusing for patients to navigate. Studies estimate that up to 80% of medical bills contain mistakes, ranging from simple administrative errors that can cost people thousands of dollars to more serious issues like duplicate charges, undocumented services, or outright fraudulent billing. Yet most patients have no idea how to request their records, how to compare them to their bill, or what rights they have when something looks wrong.
After helping families challenge hundreds of thousands of dollars in unfair charges and seeing the same patterns repeat again and again, we built Medical FairBill to give people a clear, accessible, and powerful way to fight back — and to make fairness, accuracy, and transparency the norm rather than the exception in medical billing.

We built Medical FairBill for:

- Patients

- Families

- Caregivers

- Patient advocates

- Legal-aid teams

- Social workers

- Consumer-protection agencies

- Anyone dealing with confusing or potentially unfair medical bills can use it.

Medical FairBill is designed to help you more effectively dispute unfair medical bills. Future versions will help you dispute unfair decisions by your insurer. The kinds of issues Medical FairBill can identify include:

Clinical inconsistencies
- Billed services not supported by documentation
- Medications billed but not administered
- Imaging or labs billed but not noted in the record
- Procedures not reflected in clinical notes

Duplicate or invalid billing
- Duplicate medication charges
- Multiple facility fees
- Charges repeated across line items

Upcoding / overcharging
- Higher-level ER visit codes without documentation
- Excessive imaging or unnecessary services
- Inflated charges inconsistent with clinical complexity

Administrative violations
- Bills issued years late
- Charges sent to collections without notice
- Claims not submitted to insurance

Financial-assistance issues
- Patients billed despite likely charity-care eligibility

You will receive:
- A plain-language explanation of each issue
- Citations and excerpts from your medical record
- Confidence scores
- A customized dispute letter
- Instructions on where and how to send it
- Optional access to a free consultation

Nothing is sent automatically. You remain in full control.

Medical FairBill cannot guarantee outcomes. However, many patients have used similar evidence-based dispute letters to:
- Reduce overcharges
- Correct inaccurate or inflated bills
- Remove incorrect services
- Get bills adjusted or waived
- In some cases, eliminate the bill entirely

Medical FairBill's goal is to give you the strongest possible foundation to dispute unfair charges.

Step 1: You answer a short intake questionnaire.
These questions collect information the AI cannot infer from your documents alone, such as:
- Whether you may qualify for financial assistance
- Whether your bill was sent to collections without notice
- Whether the hospital delayed filing your claim
- Whether you received inconsistent statements
These administrative issues often strengthen disputes.

Step 2. You upload your two documents.
You upload:
- Your itemized bill, and
- Your complete medical record from the visit
These are required to verify whether charges are supported by documentation.

Step 3. Medical FairBill’s AI analyzes your documents to surface potential issues.
The system:
- Scans for and removes personally identifiable information whenever detected
- Extracts relevant billing and clinical text
- Compares the bill to the medical record
- Flags inconsistencies, mismatches, duplicates, or unsupported charges
- Assigns a confidence score to each issue
- Lets you decide which issues to include or exclude

Step 4. Medical FairBill generates a dispute letter.
Medical FairBill creates a detailed letter summarizing the issues you selected, citing evidence from your medical record, and outlining your request for correction from the provider. You stay fully in control. Nothing is submitted automatically.

You must have both of the following:

1. Your complete medical record
This should include:
- Physician notes
- Nursing notes
- Orders
- Medications administered
- Imaging reports
- Procedure notes
- Clinical chart documentation

Hospitals often send records that are dozens or even hundreds of pages long. That's normal.

2. Your itemized bill (not a general bill stating an overall amount)
An itemized bill will typically list:
- CPT/HCPCS codes
- Units and quantities
- Line-item charges
- Medications
- Supplies
- Facility fees

Without both documents, Medical FairBill cannot reliably detect errors.

Note: Do not upload your insurer's explanation of benefits (EOB) in lieu of your itemized bill or complete medical record. EOB documents are more useful for disputing decisions with your insurer. This tool is designed to dispute overbilling by a medical facility.

You are legally entitled to both under the HIPAA Right of Access. Many hospitals allow online requests via their patient portal.

You can typically search "obtain medical records [Hospital Name]"

If the information is not available online, you may need to contact the medical facility's medical records department and/or billing office. Make sure to request a "complete itemized bill and full medical record."

This is extremely common. For example, a single ER visit may generate separate bills from:
- The hospital
- The emergency physician group
- Radiology
- Pathology
- Anesthesia
- Other independent specialists

It is common for each provider to maintain separate billing systems and separate documentation.

Each bill must be reviewed and disputed separately. You can run each provider's bill through Medical FairBill. There is no limit and the tool is free.

Medical FairBill can still help. If you believe the debt is invalid:

1. Contact the debt collector and clearly state: "I dispute this debt. Please cease collection until proper validation is provided."

2. Use Medical FairBill to analyze the underlying bill.

3. Submit the dispute letter to both the hospital and the collection agency.

Many collections cases arise from charges that are incorrect or unsupported.

Yes. Even if your bill has already been submitted to your insurer, you may still have been overcharged. If you have a high-deductible plan or large cost-sharing responsibilities that will translate to higher costs for you. If Medical FairBill identifies errors or unsupported charges, you should still consider disputing the bill with the hospital.

If your dispute is successful, the hospital will typically correct the bill and resubmit the claim to your insurance provider. When the insurer reprocesses the corrected claim, your out-of-pocket costs may decrease, and you may be eligible for a refund or recalculation of what you owe.

Submitting a corrected claim is a standard process and does not negatively affect your insurance coverage.

Not right now. Medical FairBill is built specifically for medical bill disputes, not insurance appeals. We hope to expand functionality to include insurance issues.

Partially. Medical FairBill's intake questions help determine whether you may qualify for financial assistance. If you appear eligible, we encourage you to work with Dollar For, a nonprofit that specializes in charity-care applications and has helped eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in medical debt.

Medical FairBill is designed not to process personally-identifiable information unless you explicitly choose to share it (e.g., for a consultation).

When you upload documents:
- The system scans for potential personally-identifiable information such as names, dates of birth, MRNs, and addresses
- It attempts to remove these fields before processing
- Only clinical and billing text is analyzed

We do our best to remove all personally-identifiable information. We also only use AI models that do not store your data. You may manually redact documents for additional peace of mind.

We never sell, share, or disclose your data to hospitals, insurers, or third parties. Aside from some aggregate-level data (see next question) we delete all information once you end your session.

Medical FairBill collects non-personal, aggregated data to improve the tool and support transparency research. This includes:
- Number of people using the platform
- Total dollar amount of charges reviewed or disputed
- Types of errors or issues surfaced
- The hospital or medical facility involved (after personally-identifiable information is removed)
- General usage patterns

This data cannot be tied back to you and is never shared with healthcare providers or insurers.

No. Medical FairBill is not legal advice. It is a research and analysis tool that helps you gather evidence and prepare a strong dispute.

Advocates and attorneys may still be helpful, and may use Medical FairBill to guide their work.

Medical FairBill is built as public-interest technology supported by philanthropic funding, allowing it to remain free for:
- Patients
- Patient advocates
- Legal-aid teams
- Government consumer-protection offices

Medical FairBill was created by Walter Kerr and Vinh Tran. After receiving a surprise ER bill issued years after the visit – and discovering multiple major errors – Walter successfully disputed it down to $0 owed. When he wrote publicly about the experience, hundreds of people reached out with their own medical-billing nightmare stories, and he helped dozens of families dispute unfair charges.

Across hundreds of bills, Walter noticed the same patterns repeating themselves and sought advice from experts, including patients' advocates and the team at the Marshall Allen Project, named for the late Marshall Allen, author of Never Pay the First Bill. Walter then teamed up with Vinh to build Medical FairBill, a public-interest platform designed to help people fight back at scale and bring greater fairness and transparency to medical billing.

Please fill out this form or write to team [at] fightmedicaldebt.org.