AI lab Anthropic is making a major push into healthcare with the launch of Claude for Healthcare and an expansion of its life sciences offerings.
The announcement, timed to coincide with the start of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week, comes just days after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Health. That’s no coincidence and reflects the growing competition among leading AI labs to build specialized products for lucrative industries like healthcare, finance, and coding.
The Claude for Healthcare announcements include a partnership with HealthEx, a startup that allows patients to see all of their electronic medical records in a single place and control access to that data. The partnership includes a way for users to connect their personal medical records to Anthropic’s Claude in order to use the chatbot to answer health-related questions.
“HealthEx lets people bring their health records into a conversation with Claude and ask important questions in everyday language—What does this lab result mean? What should I bring up with my doctor? How has this number changed over time?—and get answers grounded in their own health history,” Amol Avasare, product lead at Anthropic, said.
The announcements also include a similar set of connectors for Function Health, a company that helps patients schedule lab tests and interpret the results, as well as integrations with Apple Health and Android Health Connect that will be rolling out to beta testers next week. For now, the connectors to HealthEx and Function Health are available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the U.S.
Health-related queries are among the leading consumer use cases of AI chatbots. But so far, Anthropic has been less focused on serving the general consumer market than its rival OpenAI, which boasts more than 800 million weekly users. Anthropic is thought to have far fewer consumer users and has instead concentrated on specialized use cases, such as software coding, that more naturally appeal to enterprise customers. It has pulled ahead of OpenAI in enterprise marketshare according to several recent surveys. It has also recently been creating more tailored versions of Claude to serve other industry or professional verticals, such as Claude for Financial Services and Claude for Life Sciences.
Anthropic has said it is interested in serving consumers as well as large organizations, and today’s announcements were aimed at both consumers and enterprise customers, such as hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies.
New offerings for healthcare providers, insurers, and pharma
The company said it was adding connectors to industry-standard databases including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed.
These connectors are designed to help healthcare providers with tasks like speeding up prior authorization requests, supporting claims appeals, coordinating care, and triaging patient messages.
For life sciences companies, Anthropic is expanding beyond its initial focus on preclinical research to support clinical trial operations and regulatory work. New connectors include Medidata for clinical trial data and ClinicalTrials.gov. It is also launching connectors to bioRxiv and medRxiv—which are repositories for medical and biological research papers, usually before their findings have been peer reviewed; Open Targets, a database of identified drug targets; and ChEMBL, a database of bioactive compounds that could be used to make drugs.
The company is working with major healthcare and pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Genmab, Banner Health, Flatiron Health, and Veeva, among others. In a video clip Anthropic provided to reporters, it showed how Claude can now help a pharmaceutical company design a protocol for a Phase II clinical trial of a hypothetical drug designed to treat Parkinson’s Disease. It reduced the time it takes to draft the protocol design from many days to just about an hour.
Letting Claude use medical records to answer patient queries
Among the centerpieces of the new consumer health offerings is the partnership with HealthEx, which can help patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems.
Fortune talked with executives from both companies exclusively about the new offering.
“Personal health records today are scattered across providers, and it can be difficult to get a complete view,” Avasare told Fortune. “HealthEx built a way to use Claude to unify those records with user consent and strong controls. Users decide what to share and can revoke access at any time, and their health data is never used for model training.”
Photo courtesy of HealthEx
Users enable the HealthEx connector inside Claude, verify their identity, and connect their patient portal logins. HealthEx then unifies records across providers. When users ask Claude health-related questions, Claude uses Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard Anthropic developed for connecting AI to external data sources—to securely retrieve relevant portions of the record for each specific question.
To enhance data privacy, Claude requests only the categories of information most likely to be relevant to a question—such as medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctor notes—rather than pulling an entire medical record. If relevance isn’t obvious, Claude can prompt users to broaden the scope, asking if they want to look further back in their history, Avasare said.
Priyanka Agarwal, cofounder and CEO of HealthEx, said the partnership addresses a fundamental problem in American healthcare: making it easier for consumers to access and understand their own health data.
“We’re giving every American a safe, private way for them to use their health data with AI,” Agarwal told Fortune. “We know that AI based on personal context is going to be more effective at providing support.” She said that by connecting medical records to HealthEx and HealthEx to Claude, users will get “responses [that] are grounded in your health history, not generic advice.”
According to Anthropic, the healthcare and life sciences announcements are possible because of recent improvements to Claude’s underlying capabilities. When tested on simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks, Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic’s latest model, substantially outperforms earlier releases. The company also said Opus 4.5 with extended thinking shows improvements in producing correct answers on honesty evaluations, reflecting progress on reducing factual hallucinations.
