What is Claude for Healthcare? Anthropic launches new AI tool to take on ChatGPT Health

Anthropic has launched a new service called Claude for Healthcare, which will allow customers and healthcare providers to use Claude for medical purposes. The company has also launched new capabilities for Claude in life sciences, allowing the chatbot to connect to more scientific platforms and provide support in areas like clinical trial management and regulatory operations.

The new features by Anthropic come as there is growing use of AI tools in healthcare, while rival OpenAI also launched its ChatGPT Health feature last week.

What is Anthropic offering?

Anthropic says it is adding several connectors to Claude in order to make healthcare information easier to find, access, and understand. These connectors will allow users to pull information from ‘industry-standard systems and databases’.

Claude will be able to connect to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, among other databases.

What can Claude for Healthcare do?

Anthropic says Claude for Healthcare can help provide meaningful support to healthcare startups building new products, along with large enterprises looking to integrate AI more deeply into their offerings.

As for individuals, Anthropic says it is making it ‘easier for individuals to understand their health information and prepare for important medical conversations with clinicians.’ The new feature will allow Claude access to users’ lab results and health records.

“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 aim is to make patients’ conversations with doctors more productive, and to help users stay well-informed about their health,” the company said in a blog post.

“These integrations are private by design. Users can choose exactly the information they share with Claude, must explicitly opt in to enable access, and can disconnect or edit Claude’s permissions at any time. We do not use users’ health data to train models,” it added.

The feature, however, is limited to users in the US and only to Claude Pro and Max plan subscribers. The company says New HealthEx and Function connectors are available to users in beta today, while Apple Health and Android Health connectors will roll out to users in beta this week on both Claude iOS and Android apps.

The company also said that Claude will show contextual disclaimers, acknowledge its uncertainty, and direct users to healthcare professionals for personalised guidance.