Anthropic’s Healthcare Push Explained: What Its New AI Features Mean For Doctors And Patients
Anthropic has unveiled new tools that enable both users and service providers to handle medical data, echoing steps already taken by OpenAI.
AI company Anthropic has announced a significant healthcare push, rolling out Claude for Healthcare and widening its life sciences initiatives. The announcement coincides with this week’s JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco and arrives shortly after OpenAI’s own healthcare-focused release, reflecting a broader scramble among AI firms to develop industry-specific products for areas such as medicine, banking and coding.
As part of the Claude for Healthcare rollout, Anthropic has struck a partnership with HealthEx, a start-up that brings patients’ electronic medical records together in one dashboard while giving them control over who can view the data. The tie-up also enables users to link their personal health records to Claude, allowing the chatbot to respond to medical queries.
The company is also rolling out similar integrations for Function Health, a service that helps individuals schedule lab tests and interpret medical results. Connections with Apple Health and Android Health Connect are expected to reach beta users next week. Currently, only Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US can access the HealthEx and Function Health connectors.
“When connected, Claude can summarise users’ medical history, explain test results in plain language, detect patterns across fitness and health metrics, and prepare questions for appointments. The aim is to make patients' conversations with doctors more productive, and to help users stay well-informed about their health,” Anthropic said in a blog post.
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The company said it is introducing access to several standard medical databases, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services coverage, the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) disease classification system, the National Provider Identifier Registry and the PubMed research archive.
The integrations are intended to assist clinicians with administrative and clinical workflows, including faster prior authorisations, handling claims appeals, coordinating patient care and prioritising incoming messages.
“These integrations are private by design. Users can choose exactly the information they share with Claude, must explicitly opt-in to enable access, and can disconnect or edit Claude’s permissions at any time. We do not use users’ health data to train models,” the company emphasised.
Anthropic is collaborating with leading healthcare and pharmaceutical firms, including AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Genmab, Banner Health, Flatiron Health and Veeva. In a video shared with journalists, the company demonstrated how Claude can assist a pharmaceutical team in drafting a Phase II clinical trial protocol for a hypothetical Parkinson’s Disease treatment, cutting the process from several days to roughly one hour.
The AI firm is extending its life sciences capabilities, expanding from preclinical research into clinical trial management and regulatory support. New integrations cover Medidata and ClinicalTrials.gov for trial-related data, alongside bioRxiv and medRxiv for early-stage research papers, Open Targets for drug target information, and ChEMBL, which catalogues bioactive molecules relevant to drug discovery.
Anthropic attributes its latest healthcare and life sciences developments to upgrades in Claude’s core technology. In simulations of practical medical and scientific tasks, the company says its newest model, Claude Opus 4.5, significantly outperforms previous versions. Anthropic also notes that Opus 4.5 with “extended thinking” demonstrates better accuracy in honesty assessments, signalling a reduction in factual errors.
