Anthropic launches Claude for Healthcare with health records access days after OpenAI's push

Anthropic rolls out new healthcare and life science features for Claude | Fortune

AI lab Anthropic is making a major push into healthcare with the launch of Claude for Healthcare and an expansion of its life sciences offerings. The announcement, timed to coincide with the start of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week, comes just days after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Health. That's no coincidence and reflects the growing competition among leading AI labs to build specialized products for lucrative industries like healthcare, finance, and coding. The Claude for Healthcare announcements include a partnership with HealthEx, a startup that allows patients to see all of their electronic medical records in a single place and control access to that data. The partnership includes a way for users to connect their personal medical records to Anthropic's Claude in order to use the chatbot to answer health-related questions. "HealthEx lets people bring their health records into a conversation with Claude and ask important questions in everyday language -- What does this lab result mean? What should I bring up with my doctor? How has this number changed over time? -- and get answers grounded in their own health history," Amol Avasare, product lead at Anthropic, said. The announcements also include a similar set of connectors for Function Health, a company that helps patients schedule lab tests and interpret the results, as well as integrations with Apple Health and Android Health Connect that will be rolling out to beta testers next week. For now, the connectors to HealthEx and Function Health are available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the U.S. Health-related queries are among the leading consumer use cases of AI chatbots. But so far, Anthropic has been less focused on serving the general consumer market than its rival OpenAI, which boasts more than 800 million weekly users. Anthropic is thought to have far fewer consumer users and has instead concentrated on specialized use cases, such as software coding, that more naturally appeal to enterprise customers. It has pulled ahead of OpenAI in enterprise marketshare according to several recent surveys. It has also recently been creating more tailored versions of Claude to serve other industry or professional verticals, such as Claude for Financial Services and Claude for Life Sciences. Anthropic has said it is interested in serving consumers as well as large organizations, and today's announcements were aimed at both consumers and enterprise customers, such as hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. The company said it was adding connectors to industry-standard databases including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed. These connectors are designed to help healthcare providers with tasks like speeding up prior authorization requests, supporting claims appeals, coordinating care, and triaging patient messages. For life sciences companies, Anthropic is expanding beyond its initial focus on preclinical research to support clinical trial operations and regulatory work. New connectors include Medidata for clinical trial data and ClinicalTrials.gov. It is also launching connectors to bioRxiv and medRxiv -- which are repositories for medical and biological research papers, usually before their findings have been peer reviewed; Open Targets, a database of identified drug targets; and ChEMBL, a database of bioactive compounds that could be used to make drugs. The company is working with major healthcare and pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Genmab, Banner Health, Flatiron Health, and Veeva, among others. In a video clip Anthropic provided to reporters, it showed how Claude can now help a pharmaceutical company design a protocol for a Phase II clinical trial of a hypothetical drug designed to treat Parkinson's Disease. It reduced the time it takes to draft the protocol design from many days to just about an hour. Among the centerpieces of the new consumer health offerings is the partnership with HealthEx, which can help patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems. Fortune talked with executives from both companies exclusively about the new offering. "Personal health records today are scattered across providers, and it can be difficult to get a complete view," Avasare told Fortune. "HealthEx built a way to use Claude to unify those records with user consent and strong controls. Users decide what to share and can revoke access at any time, and their health data is never used for model training." Users enable the HealthEx connector inside Claude, verify their identity, and connect their patient portal logins. HealthEx then unifies records across providers. When users ask Claude health-related questions, Claude uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) -- an open standard Anthropic developed for connecting AI to external data sources -- to securely retrieve relevant portions of the record for each specific question. To enhance data privacy, Claude requests only the categories of information most likely to be relevant to a question -- such as medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctor notes -- rather than pulling an entire medical record. If relevance isn't obvious, Claude can prompt users to broaden the scope, asking if they want to look further back in their history, Avasare said. Priyanka Agarwal, cofounder and CEO of HealthEx, said the partnership addresses a fundamental problem in American healthcare: making it easier for consumers to access and understand their own health data. "We're giving every American a safe, private way for them to use their health data with AI," Agarwal told Fortune. "We know that AI based on personal context is going to be more effective at providing support." She said that by connecting medical records to HealthEx and HealthEx to Claude, users will get "responses [that] are grounded in your health history, not generic advice." According to Anthropic, the healthcare and life sciences announcements are possible because of recent improvements to Claude's underlying capabilities. When tested on simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks, Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic's latest model, substantially outperforms earlier releases. The company also said Opus 4.5 with extended thinking shows improvements in producing correct answers on honesty evaluations, reflecting progress on reducing factual hallucinations.

Anthropic joins OpenAI's push into health care with new Claude tools

The Anthropic app on a smartphone.Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images Anthropic announced a new suite of health care and life sciences features Sunday, enabling users of its Claude artificial intelligence platform to share access to their health records to better understand their medical information. The launch comes just days after rival OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health, signaling a broader push by major AI companies into health care, a field seen as both a major opportunity and a sensitive testing ground for generative AI technology. Both tools will allow users to share information from health records and fitness apps, including Apple's iOS Health app, to personalize health-related conversations. At the same time, the expansion comes amid heightened scrutiny over whether AI systems can safely interpret medical information and avoid offering harmful guidance. Users must join a waitlist to access OpenAI's ChatGPT Health tool, while Claude's health care offerings are now available for Pro and Max plan subscribers in the U.S. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic, one of the world's largest AI companies and newly rumored to be valued at $350 billion, said Sunday's announcement represents a step toward using AI to help people navigate complex health care issues. "When navigating through health systems and health situations, you often have this feeling that you're sort of alone and that you're tying together all this data from all these sources, stuff about your health and your medical records, and you're on the phone all the time," he told NBC News. "I'm really excited about getting to the world where Claude can just take care of all of that." With the new Claude for Healthcare functions, "you can integrate all of your personal information together with your medical records and your insurance records, and have Claude as the orchestrator and be able to navigate the whole thing and simplify it for you," Kauderer-Abrams said. When unveiling ChatGPT Health last week, OpenAI said hundreds of millions of people ask wellness- or health-related questions on ChatGPT every week. The company stressed that ChatGPT Health is "not intended for diagnosis or treatment," but is instead meant to help users "navigate everyday questions and understand patterns over time -- not just moments of illness." AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help users understand complex and inscrutable medical reports, double-check doctors' decisions and, for billions of people around the world who lack access to essential medical care, summarize and synthesize medical information that would otherwise be inaccessible. Like OpenAI, Anthropic emphasized privacy protections around its new offerings. In a blog post accompanying Sunday's launch, the company said health data shared with Claude is excluded from the model's memory and not used for training future systems. In addition, users "can disconnect or edit permissions at any time," Anthropic said. Anthropic also announced new tools for health care providers and expanded its Claude for Life Science offerings that focus on improving scientific discovery. Anthropic said its platform now includes a "HIPAA-ready infrastructure" -- referring to the federal law governing medical privacy -- and can connect to federal health care coverage databases, the official registry of medical providers and other services that will ease physician and health-provider workloads. These new features could help automate time-consuming tasks such as preparing prior authorization requests for specialist care and supporting insurance appeals by matching clinical guidelines to patient records. Dhruv Parthasarathy, chief technology officer at Commure, which creates AI solutions for medical documentation, said in a statement that Claude's features will help Commure in "saving clinicians millions of hours annually and returning their focus to patient care." The rollout comes after months of increased scrutiny of AI chatbots' role in dispensing mental health and medical advice. On Thursday, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging their AI tools contributed to worsening mental health among teenagers who died by suicide. Anthropic, OpenAI and other leading AI companies caution that their systems can make mistakes and should not be substitutes for professional judgment. Anthropic's acceptable use policy requires that "a qualified professional ... must review the content or decision prior to dissemination or finalization" when Claude is used for "healthcare decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care, therapy, mental health, or other medical guidance." "These tools are incredibly powerful, and for many people, they can save you 90% of the time that you spend on something," Anthropic's Kauderer-Abrams said. "But for critical use cases where every detail matters, you should absolutely still check the information. We're not claiming that you can completely remove the human from the loop. We see it as a tool to amplify what the human experts can do."

Anthropic pushes into healthcare to help patients understand their medical records - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic pushes into healthcare to help patients understand their medical records Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic PBC debuted new healthcare and life sciences capabilities in its flagship chatbot Claude on Sunday, saying users can now share their medical records with the service to better understand their health. Claude now lets users share information from their official medical records and fitness apps such as Apple Inc.'s iOS Health, so it can engage in more personalized conversations regarding their health. The new features are available now for Claude Pro and Max plan subscribers in the U.S. The launch comes just days after Anthropic's main rival OpenAI Group PBC debuted ChatGPT Health, and underscores how AI companies view healthcare as a major opportunity for the technology. Anthropic Head of Life Sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams told NBC News in an interview that the new features build on last October's launch of Claude for Life Sciences, which transformed the chatbot into a proactive research partner for clinicians and scientists that can aid in tasks such as drug discovery. In this case, Anthropic is now targeting actual patients, with the aim being to help them better understand their health. "When connected, Claude can summarize users' medical history, explain test results in plain language, detect patterns across fitness and health metrics, and prepare questions for appointments," the company wrote in a blog post. "The aim is to make patients' conversations with doctors more productive, and to help users stay well-informed about their health." When it launched ChatGPT Health last week, OpenAI said it was already seeing hundreds of millions of users ask the standard version of its chatbot health- and wellness-related questions every week, hence the enormous potential it sees in making a more concerted effort at tackling medical issues. However, the company was keen to stress that the app is not intended to be used for diagnosis or to recommend any particular treatment. Rather, it's simply there to help users "navigate everyday questions and understand patterns over time." Kauderer-Abrams said Claude for Healthcare can help users to understand complex medical reports more easily, double-check doctors' decisions and also summarize and synthesize medical information for the billions of people around the world who lack access to it. As with OpenAI, Anthropic was eager to stress the privacy protections it has built into Claude for Healthcare. It explained that healthcare data shared with the chatbot will not be dumped in its memory and will never be used to train future versions of the model. Users also have the option to disconnect their medical records or edit the chatbot's permissions at any time, the company said. Besides patients, Anthropic is also targeting healthcare providers, expanding the Claude for Life Sciences offering that's primarily focused on research. That offering now boasts a "HIPAA-ready infrastructure," the company said, referring to the U.S. federal law that governs medical privacy. This means it can connect to federal healthcare coverage databases, the federal registry of medical providers and other services to help make the lives of physicians easier. For instance, the chatbot can help with time-consuming tasks such as preparing prior authorization requests for specialist care, or prepare the ground for insurance appeals by matching patient records with clinical guidelines. Dhruv Parthasarathy, chief technology officer of Commure Inc., which sells AI tools that aid in the creation of medical documentation, said Claude will help his company to save clinicians "millions of hours annually" and return their focus to patient care. While Anthropic and OpenAI clearly see healthcare as a major opportunity, the launch will likely enhance scrutiny over the suitability of these kinds of tools in dispensing medical advice. To date, their track record has been questionable, with Google LLC and Character Technologies Inc. last week agreeing to settle out of court following a lawsuit that alleged their AI chatbots had influenced the mental health of a teenager who later committed suicide. Anthropic does put out a disclaimer, warning that Claude can make mistakes and should not be used as a substitute for qualified medical advice. "For critical use cases where every detail matters, you should absolutely still check the information," said Kauderer-Adams. "We're not claiming that you can completely remove the human from the loop. We see it as a tool to amplify what the human experts can do.

Anthropic follows OpenAI in rolling out healthcare AI tools By Investing.com

Investing.com-- Anthropic said on Sunday it is launching a new range of healthcare tools under its Claude chatbot, just days after rival OpenAI announced a similar move. Anthropic said its tools were compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and could be used by hospitals and doctors to find protected health data. Upgrade to InvestingPro for more key AI-related breaking news and insights The company also enabled users to export their health data from mobile apps such as Apple Health, which in turn can be shared with healthcare providers. The move is the latest from the world's leading AI companies, with healthcare seen as a potential application for their AI technology. AI technology can in theory be useful in medicine, especially for improving diagnostics, analysing patient data, and even potentially developing new treatments. But the tendency of large-language models to hallucinate information could present potential risks. Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI chatbot, was recently seen in funding talks for a $350 billion valuation. The company is backed by Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Google owner Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and is also viewed as a major competitor for OpenAI.