Claude AI gains healthcare powers with new update

Anthropic has dropped a major healthcare update for Claude, less than a week after ChatGPT announced a similar feature. While there’s plenty of enterprise stuff in here for hospitals and insurance companies, the consumer-facing features are what caught our attention.

The features are only available in the US right now, but still provide a glimpse at what’s to come. Let’s take a look.

Help with medical records, insurance claims, and doctor visits

If you’re a Claude Pro or Max subscriber in the US, you can now give the AI access to your actual health records and lab results. This will allow the AI to look at your medical history and explain it in plain English.

The way this works is through new integrations with HealthEx and Function, which are available in beta right now. Apple Health and Android Health Connect support is rolling out this week through the mobile apps too.

Once you connect these, Claude can summarise your medical history, break down confusing test results, spot patterns in your fitness and health data, and even help you come up with questions to ask your doctor before an appointment.

Anthropic is being pretty careful about privacy here, which makes sense given how sensitive medical data can be. Users have to explicitly opt in, they can choose exactly what information Claude sees, and they can disconnect or change permissions whenever they want. The company also says they won’t use any of this health data to train their models.

And for safety, the chatbot will acknowledge when it’s uncertain about something and will direct you to actual healthcare professionals for personalised advice.

That said, there’s a lot more going on under the hood for the healthcare industry itself. Anthropic added connectors that let Claude pull information from Medicare databases, look up medical billing codes, and verify provider credentials. This should come in handy for insurance companies.

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The life sciences side got some love too. Claude can now connect to clinical trial platforms like Medidata and ClinicalTrials.gov, plus preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv. This should make the AI more useful for researchers working on drug development and regulatory submissions.