Anthropic announced a new suite of features for healthcare and life sciences on Sunday, allowing 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 the introduction of rival OpenAI. ChatGPT Healthsignaling a broader push by big AI companies into healthcare, an area 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 Health app, to personalize health-related conversations. At the same time, the expansion comes amid increased scrutiny over whether AI systems can safely interpret medical information and avoid providing harmful advice.
Claude’s new Health Records features are now available in beta for Pro and Max users in the US, while integrations with Apple Health and Android Health Connect are rolling out in beta to Pro and Max plan subscribers in the US this week. Users must join a waiting list to access OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health tool.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Head of Life Sciences at Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI companies and it is rumored to be valued at $350 billionsaid Sunday’s announcement represents a step toward using AI to help people manage complex health issues.
“When you’re navigating health systems and health situations, you often feel like you’re sort of on your own and connecting all this data from all these sources, information about your health and your medical records, and you’re on the phone all the time,” he told NBC News. “I’m really excited to come to a world where Claude can take care of all that.”
With the new Claude for Healthcare features, “you can integrate all of your personal information with your medical records and your insurance records, and have Claude as your 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 emphasized that ChatGPT Health is “not intended for diagnosis or treatment,” but rather aims to help users “navigate everyday issues and understand trends over time – not just moments of illness.”
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help users understand complex and impenetrable medical reports, double-check doctors’ decisions and, for billions of people around the world who do not have access to essential medical care, summarize and synthesize medical information that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Like OpenAI, Anthropic has placed an emphasis on privacy around its new offerings. In a blog post accompanying Sunday’s launchthe company said health data shared with Claude is excluded from the model’s memory and is not used for training future systems. Additionally, users “can log out or change permissions at any time,” Anthropic said.
Anthropic also announced new tools for healthcare providers and expanded its Claude for Life Science offerings that focus on enhancing scientific discovery.
Anthropic said its platform now includes “HIPAA-ready infrastructure” — referring to the federal law governing medical privacy — and can connect to federal health care coverage databases, the official medical provider registry and other services that will ease the workload on doctors and health providers.
These new features could help automate time-consuming tasks such as preparing prior authorization requests for specialty care and handling insurance calls 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 “save clinicians millions of hours per year and put their focus back on patient care.”
The rollout comes after months of increased scrutiny of The role of AI chatbots in providing medical and mental health advice. THURSDAY, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging that their AI tools contributed to the worsening mental health of teenagers who died by suicide.
Anthropic, OpenAI and other major AI companies warn that their systems can make mistakes and should not be a substitute for professional judgment.
Anthropic’s Acceptable Use Policy requires that “a qualified professional…should review the content or decision before dissemination or finalization” when Claude is used for “health care decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care, therapy, mental health, or other medical advice.”
“These tools are incredibly powerful, and for many people, they can save you 90 percent of the time you spend on something,” said Anthropic’s Kauderer-Abrams. “But for critical use cases where every detail matters, you definitely need to verify the information. We don’t claim you can completely remove the human from the loop. We see it as a tool to amplify what human experts can do.”