- Anthropic’s new Claude for Health platform can summarize your health data
- It can also analyze and explain medical test results in plain language
- Healthcare professionals can use Claude to speed up tasks such as pre-approvals and complaints
Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot is scrubbing into your medical care. The company has debuted a new initiative called Claude for Healthcare, inviting US users to let their digital assistant peek under the hood of their personal health data. The AI can, with permission, look at lab tests, fitness metrics, and doctor appointments by connecting to platforms like HealthEx, Function, Apple Health, and Android Health Connect. The timing is notable as it closely follows OpenAI’s disclosure of ChatGPT Health and its somewhat similar provisions.
Basically, Claude can act as a translator of sorts for your blood work and medical history, as well as delve into information collected by your smartwatch to provide more specific suggestions for improving your health. It will also give you ideas for what to talk to your doctor about at your next visit. It’s an opt-in feature for Claude Pro and Max subscribers and comes with HIPAA-compliant tools for doctors that are supposed to streamline their paperwork for things like prior authorization, complaints and care coordination.
For the average user, it’s a question of how much access to give Claude. However, if you connect Claude to your health data, it can pull in your medical records and interpret them like a well-read medical assistant. Your cholesterol numbers are explained in plain language. Your last five years of back pain becomes a digestible summary.
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All of this is explicitly opt-in. Anthropic insists that the system is private by design: you choose what data Claude can see, you can revoke access at any time, and your information is not used to train future models.
Anthropic also claims that Claude for Healthcare will provide relief to hospitals and healthcare providers. For example, it can review prior authorization requests, connect to Medicare’s coverage database, pull the latest criteria, compare it to a patient’s file, and suggest a decision that a human reviewer can approve or refine. That means less time hunting down scattered documents and more time getting people what they need.
Claude also integrates with the ICD-10 system for diagnosis and billing codes and with the National Provider Identifier Registry, helping staff verify provider credentials, submit cleaner claims, and navigate the arcane coding maze that fuels the healthcare economy. And on the enterprise side, companies using Claude in HIPAA-compliant environments can connect it to PubMed to pull relevant studies, literature reviews, or clinical research.
Fresh Claude
Claude for Healthcare also opens doors for startups and developers. On the Claude Developer Platform, new healthcare-focused apps are already underway: ambient note-taking tools that reduce the documentation burden for clinicians, lightweight triage assistants for patient messages, and even chart review systems that keep track of the finer points of clinical guidelines.
This is not happening in a vacuum, as ChatGPT Health’s appearance indicates. But while Claude for Healthcare and ChatGPT Health both aim to make sense of the complex, often opaque world of medical data, they take markedly different approaches. Claude is designed as an artificial intelligence that can not only explain your lab results in plain language, but also connect directly to the machinery of the US healthcare system. Although it offers patient-facing features, Claude’s real muscle is in administrative clarity. ChatGPT Health, on the other hand, lives inside the ChatGPT app, offering a separate space where users can connect apps and work more from a personal angle.
Whether Claude for Health succeeds may depend on how well Anthropic keeps its promises of privacy and transparency. But the value of having an AI you trust explain your health is simply obvious, especially if it also helps your doctor get you faster.
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