Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup behind the Claude model, has just officially launched Claude for Healthcare, a specialized AI tool package for the healthcare sector.
This move marks an important step forward for Anthropic in medical technology, while placing the company in a direct competitive position with OpenAI, the unit that just introduced ChatGPT for Health just a few days earlier.
According to Anthropic, Claude for Healthcare is built on the latest Claude models, especially Claude Opus 4.5. In medical and life science task simulation tests, this version shows superior performance compared to previous generations.
The new toolkit is designed to serve many audiences, from consumers, doctors, healthcare providers to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, through integration with certified medical technology platforms.
In a blog post on January 11, Anthropic said that Claude can support medical startups that are developing new products, as well as large businesses that want to bring AI deeper into the operating process. This is also a natural expansion of life science services that the company has pursued before.
However, the explosion of AI tools in healthcare also brings many concerns. Experts warn about the risk of "awareness", when AI creates false information or causes misunderstandings.
A recent report by The Guardian shows that Google's AI health summary has given inaccurate advice to pancreatic cancer patients, raising concerns that medical advice from AI may increase the risk of death if users have absolute trust.
Faced with this concern, Anthropic said that they have partnered with HealthEx, a California-based company, allowing patients to consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 different healthcare systems. After activating the HealthEx connection in Claude, verifying the identity and logging into the patient information portal, users can ask questions about personal health.
Claude will retrieve relevant information from medical records through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is an open standard developed by Anthropic to connect AI with external data.
In addition to HealthEx, Anthropic also cooperates with Function Health, allowing users to schedule tests and analyze test results using Claude. These features are currently only for paid Claude Pro and Max users in the US.
The company also announced that it will deploy beta testing to integrate Apple Health and Android Health Connect on the Claude application for iOS and Android.
In addition, Claude for Healthcare is supplemented with connections to many standard medical and scientific databases such as Medicare & Medicaid, ICD-10, PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, along with bioRxiv, medRxiv research repository and databases on drug targets, biological compounds.
