Claude for Healthcare launches

Less than a week after OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, Anthropic is making its own push into healthcare with Claude for Healthcare.

The complementary set of tools and resources will enable healthcare providers, payers and customers to utilize Claude for various tasks, including supporting patients' understanding of their health data. According to Anthropic, the new tools are "HIPAA-ready" and built on the latest Claude Opus 4.5 model, which improves on the accuracy and performance of prior iterations.

Anthropic has introduced new integrations to enable Claude Pro and Max plan subscribers in the U.S. to give Claude access to their lab results and health records. The AI platform can then summarize the subscriber's medical history, explain test results, detect patterns in their fitness and health metrics and prepare questions for medical appointments.

"The aim is to make patients' conversations with doctors more productive, and to help users stay well-informed about their health," the company stated.

Additionally, healthcare providers and payers can use Claude to expedite the prior authorization review process. The company noted that the platform can quickly gather coverage requirements from CMS or custom policies and verify clinical criteria against patient records to propose a determination for the payer to review.

Anthropic stated that Claude can help providers build stronger appeals and support payers in processing them faster. The platform can also sort through large volumes of patient portal messages, referrals and handoffs, differentiating between those that need urgent attention and those that can wait.

Further, Anthropic has added connectors, which are tools that enable Claude to access other platforms and databases. These connectors will enable Claude to gather information from various databases, including CMS' Coverage Database, the ICD-10 database and National Provider Identifier Registry.

This will enable clinicians and administrators to "save significant time finding the data and generating the reports they need," the company stated.

In addition to Claude for Healthcare, Anthropic added new capabilities to Claude for Life Sciences, including connectors to Medidata, ClinicalTrials.gov and Open Targets, as well as new Agent Skills for scientific problem selection and converting instrument data to Allotrope.

Though these new capabilities offer exciting new possibilities for healthcare professionals and patients alike, concerns about health AI risks remain, including data privacy and AI inaccuracies.

To quell some of these concerns, the company explicitly stated that it does not use users' health data to train models. Users must also select the health information they share with Claude and "opt in" to enable access.

Further, Anthropic's usage policy states that organizations using Claude for high-risk use cases, which include healthcare decisions, medical diagnosis, patient care and mental healthcare, must have a qualified professional review the content or decision that Claude generates before it is shared.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.