Anthropic takes on OpenAI with ‘Claude for Healthcare’, its own offering for doctors and patients

Anthropic has unveiled a new suite of Claude-powered AI tools that can be used for medical purposes by consumers, healthcare providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies through various integrations with certified health tech platforms.

These tools are part of the AI startup’s ‘Claude for Healthcare’ offering that is built on top of the latest Claude models, specifically Claude Opus 4.5 which outperformed its predecessors when tested on simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks, according to Anthropic.

“With these new tools, Claude can provide meaningful support for healthcare startups building new products, and for large enterprises looking to integrate AI more deeply into their operations,” the AI startup said in a blog post on Sunday, January 11.

The announcement marks Anthropic’s foray into health tech and expansion of its existing life sciences offerings. It comes just days after rival OpenAI introduced ‘ChatGPT for Health’ amid intensifying competition among leading AI startups and research labs to build specialised products for lucrative industries like healthcare, finance, and coding.

However, the growing number of AI-powered health tools has sparked privacy concerns while also highlighting the risk of ‘hallucinations’ which could lead to inaccurate or misleading medical information.

Under Claude for Healthcare, Anthropic said it has partnered with California-based HealthEx to let patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems and use the Claude AI chatbot to answer questions related to their personal health.

Deeper integration at this layer is made possible through what Anthropic calls ‘connectors’, which are tools that allow users to give Claude access to other platforms directly. They are also designed to help healthcare providers with tasks like speeding up prior authorisation requests, supporting claims appeals, coordinating care, and triaging patient messages.

In the case of HealthEx, users first need to enable the HealthEx connector inside Claude, verify their identity, and connect their patient portal logins. HealthEx then unifies records across providers. When they ask Claude a health-related question, the AI chatbot uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open standard developed by Anthropic for connecting AI to external data sources – to retrieve information from the relevant portions of the patient’s medical records.

A similar partnership with Function Health lets users schedule lab tests and interpret the results using Claude. These AI-powered features are currently only available to paid Claude Pro and Max subscribers living in the United States. Anthropic also announced that Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations will be rolling out in beta this week via the Claude iOS and Android apps.

Additionally, Anthropic said it has added connectors to industry-standard databases such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed.

Claude can also be used to retrieve data from clinical trial databases Medidata and ClinicalTrials.gov, medical research repositories bioRxiv and medRxiv, drug targets database Open Targets, and ChEMBL, a database of bioactive compounds that could be used to make drugs.

Anthropic’s healthcare push is strategic as health-related queries are reportedly one of the most common use cases of AI chatbots. Physicians’ use of AI has nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024 with 68 per cent admitting that AI gives them an advantage in being able to care for their patients, according to OpenAI.

Another survey commissioned by OpenAI found that three in five adults in the US used AI tools for their health or healthcare over the past three months, and 75 per cent of them found it to be very or extremely helpful. Similar to Claude for Healthcare, OpenAI’s recently announced ‘ChatGPT for Health’ can analyse users’ medical records to give them better answers.

While OpenAI boasts more than 800 million weekly users, Anthropic has been less focused on serving the general consumer market and prioritised capturing enterprise market share with advanced tools such as Claude Code. It has also rolled out more tailored versions of Claude to serve specialised sectors such as Claude for Financial Services and Claude for Life Sciences.