Anthropic announces Claude for healthcare after unveiling OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health

On the heels of unveiling OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health, Anthropic announced Sunday that it will offer Claude for Healthcare, a suite of tools for providers, payers and patients.

Like ChatGPT Health, Claude for Healthcare will allow users to sync health data from their phones, smartwatches, and other platforms (OpenAI and Anthropic both said their models will not use this data for training). But Anthropic’s product promises a further evolution from ChatGPT Health, which looks as though it will focus more on the patient-side chat experience as it rolls out gradually.

Although some industry professionals are concerned about the role of hallucination-prone master’s degree holders in providing medical advice to clients, Anthropic’s “agent skills” show promise.

Claude added what he calls “connectors” to give AI access to platforms and databases that can speed up searches and report generation for payers and providers, including: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage database; International Classifications of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10); National Register of Service Provider Identifiers; And PubMed.

Anthropic explained in a blog post that Claude for Health can use its connectors to speed up prior authorization review, the process by which a doctor must provide additional information to an insurance provider to find out whether it will cover a drug or treatment.

“Physicians often report that they spend more time on documentation and paperwork than actually seeing patients,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief operating officer, said in a product presentation.

For doctors, submitting prior authorization documentation is more of an administrative task than something that requires their specialized training and expertise. It’s something that makes more sense to automate than the actual process of managing medical advice… although Claude would do that too.

People already rely on LLMs for medical advice. OpenAI said that 230 million people talk about their health using ChatGPT every week, and there’s no doubt that Anthropic is monitoring this use case as well.

Naturally, both Anthropic and OpenAI warn consumers to check with healthcare professionals for more reliable, tailored guidance.