Anthropic has launched a new healthcare-focused product, placing Claude directly in the middle of hospitals, insurers and patients just weeks after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Health.
The product, called Claude for Healthcare, is designed to take on the heavy administrative and research workload that slows down medical care, while also giving patients a better way to understand their own health data.
At its core, the new product allows healthcare organisations to connect Claude to industry databases. These connections let the system search, verify and organise medical and policy information that clinicians and insurers usually spend hours tracking down.
Anthropic says this will reduce delays in processes such as prior authorisation, where doctors must justify treatments before insurers approve payment.
“Clinicians often report spending more time on documentation and paperwork than actually seeing patients,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic chief product officer said.
Rather than replacing doctors, the company is pushing Claude into the background work that clogs up healthcare. Submitting forms, checking coverage rules, matching diagnosis codes and assembling appeal documents are all tasks the system is meant to handle faster.
For insurers and providers, this could mean quicker decisions and fewer backlogs. For patients, it could mean less waiting.
Claude for Healthcare connects directly to systems such as the US Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services coverage database, the ICD-10 coding system, the National Provider Identifier registry and PubMed’s vast research library.
With these links in place, the system can cross-check policy regulations against patient records, flag missing information and prepare reports that staff would normally compile by hand.
Anthropic is also adding specialised features aimed at interoperability and approvals. One tool focuses on FHIR, the standard used to move data between healthcare systems, while another provides a configurable template for prior authorisation reviews.
The idea is to reduce errors that creep in when staff juggle multiple platforms under time pressure.
Beyond administration, the company is adding to Claude’s functions in life sciences. New integrations are intended to support clinical trials, regulatory submissions and research analysis, areas where speed and accuracy can tell whether new treatments reach the public sooner.
Patients are part of the plan too. In the US, subscribers on higher-tier plans can choose to connect Claude to personal health records, lab results and fitness data through platforms such as Apple Health and Android Health Connect.
When enabled, the system can summarise medical history, explain test results in plain language and help users prepare questions for their doctors. Anthropic stresses that users stay in control of what is shared and that health data is not used to train its models.
The development comes as large numbers of people already turn to conversational systems to discuss health issues. OpenAI has said that around 230 million people talk about their health with ChatGPT each week, a fact that patients are filling gaps where access to clinicians is limited.
Both companies, however, warn that these tools are not a substitute for professional medical advice.
