OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Clinicians

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, an iteration of ChatGPT designed to help with clinical and administrative tasks, such as medical research, documentation and HIPAA compliance support. The tool is free for any verified physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant and pharmacist in the U.S., with plans to expand access to additional countries over time. 

Clinician usage of ChatGPT has more than doubled over the past year, OpenAI said in its press release. OpenAI has embraced this trend, launching ChatGPT for Healthcare in January 2026 and the consumer-facing ChatGPT Health.  

ChatGPT for Healthcare is designed for enterprise-wide use, enabling healthcare organizations to centralize ChatGPT deployments across clinicians, administrators and researchers. In contrast, ChatGPT for Clinicians is designed for use by individual clinicians who want self-serve access to ChatGPT.  

Key capabilities of the tool 

In its announcement, OpenAI touted ChatGPT for Clinicians' ability to turn common workflows -- like referral letters and prior authorizations -- into reusable skills, enabling ChatGPT to follow the same steps each time a clinician wants to complete these tasks.  

The tool also aims to be a partner in clinical research, reasoning through cases "faster and with greater confidence with real-time, cited answers based on evidence from millions of reputable, peer-reviewed medical sources," OpenAI stated. 

Clinicians will be able to delegate medical literature reviews to ChatGPT, which can compile a report in minutes, according to OpenAI. Additionally, as practitioners research clinical questions within ChatGPT, an eligible evidence review will automatically count toward continuing medical education credits.  

HIPAA support is available through a business associate agreement for eligible accounts, and conversations will not be used to train models, OpenAI said. Security measures such as multifactor authentication are also in place to protect sensitive information. 

Users can leverage clinician-specific starter prompts to draft referral letters and patient instructions, review care pathways and synthesize evidence with citations, OpenAI stated. Clinicians will also be able to create custom GPTs and use connected apps to incorporate relevant information into their workflows. 

Individual clinicians can sign up for ChatGPT for Clinicians even if their organization already uses ChatGPT for Healthcare. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Clinicians will likely compete with OpenEvidence, an AI platform designed for physicians that aims to provide peer-reviewed medical information at the point of care. 

OpenAI touts model safety, unveils HealthBench Professional 

OpenAI emphasized the role of clinicians in providing feedback and evaluating the trustworthiness of its models. Physicians have reviewed more than 700,000 model responses to date. 

"Before release, physician advisors tested 6,924 conversations in their daily work across clinical care, documentation, and research. Overall, physicians rated 99.6% of responses as safe and accurate," OpenAI stated.  

"On a subset of 355 examples where for each, three independent physicians specified ground-truth citations, ChatGPT for Clinicians cited those sources more often than human physicians. Even so, ChatGPT for Clinicians is designed to support clinicians with information, not replace their judgment or expertise." 

Doubling down on its commitment to model trustworthiness, OpenAI also launched HealthBench Professional, an open benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on clinical tasks. 

The benchmark was organized around three common use cases: care consult, writing and documentation and medical research. Each use case scenario consists of a physician-authored conversation with ChatGPT for Clinicians and is scored via rubrics also written by physicians. 

"We report results in ChatGPT for Clinicians and across models. As a strong baseline, we asked human physicians to produce their own responses for tasks in their specialty, with unbounded time and web access,” OpenAI stated. “We found that GPT‑5.4 in the ChatGPT for Clinicians workspace outperforms base GPT‑5.4, all other OpenAI and external models, and human physicians." 

In addition to the release of ChatGPT for Clinicians and HealthBench Professional, OpenAI is releasing Health BluePrint, offering recommendations for the responsible implementation of AI in healthcare. 

"We look forward to evolving these products with feedback, and partnering with the medical community to help AI realize its full potential in health," the company concluded. 

Jill Hughes has covered health tech news since 2021.