JPM: Anthropic reveals its answer to ChatGPT for Health
Claude for Healthcare demo screen.
Anthropic has launched Claude for Healthcare, a suite of AI tools for health systems, payers, and patients, in the latest part of its push into the health category.
The announcement – made at the start of the JPM Healthcare conference in San Francisco – comes a few months after Anthropic revealed Claude for Life Sciences, a group of large language models (LLMs) and an AI assistant designed to help researchers with tasks like writing code for statistical analysis, summarising papers, and generating testable hypotheses.
With Claude for Healthcare, Anthropic is adding 'connectors' to the AI that will allow it to pull medical information from systems like the CMS coverage database, National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed. The company says the toolkit can help clinicians and administrators save time in generating reports, and can also link to health records to assist patients in interpreting their own data.
The launch comes shortly after OpenAI launched its ChatGPT for Health platform, which covers similar ground, including linking to and analysing patients' medical records and integrating with apps like Apple Fitness and MyFitnessPal.
Anthropic said Claude can already link to HealthEx and Function Health platforms and is being beta-tested for use with Apple Health and Android Health Connect. The company says the AI can help users "summarise their medical history, understand test results in plain language, spot patterns across fitness and health metrics, or prepare questions for appointments."
It has emphasised the security and privacy of its platform and pledged not to use personal data to train LLMs, much like OpenAI, but it remains to be seen whether the public will be comfortable with sharing such granular medical and health information with a tech company's AI.
For healthcare systems, Claude can speed up prior authorisation requests to insurers, support claims appeals, and coordinate patient messaging, according to the company, which was founded by a group of former OpenAI employees in 2021.
Commenting on the launch, Anthropic's health lead, Dave Nolan, said that the US healthcare system "spends more on healthcare administration than many developed countries spend on healthcare" in total.
"The system we've built actively blocks the care it's supposed to deliver. Orchestration is the core bottleneck," he added. "What matters most is building infrastructure for a different kind of healthcare. Where AI handles the administrative burden so clinicians can do what they trained for - helping patients thrive, ideally proactively, not just survive, reactively."
At JPM, Anthropic also launched additional functionality for Claude for Life Sciences, adding tools for clinical trials and regulatory functions to complement the preclinical-stage applications that were included at its launch last October. The update includes connectors to databases including Medidata and clinicaltrials.gov.
