Anthropic has unveiled a new suite of cloud-powered AI tools for medical use by consumers, health care providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies via various integrations with certified health tech platforms.
These AI healthcare assistant tools are part of the AI startups’ Cloud for Healthcare offering, built on the latest cloud models, specifically Cloud Opus 4.5, which outperformed its predecessors in simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks, according to Anthropic. With these new tools, Claude can provide meaningful support for healthcare automation. Building new products for large enterprises looking to integrate AI more deeply into their operations, the AI startup said in a blog on Sunday, January 11.
The Announcement marks Anthropic’s foray into hospital workflow impact and expansion of its existing life sciences offerings. It comes just days after rival OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Health amid intensifying competition among leading AI startups and research labs to build specialized products for lucrative industries like healthcare, finance, and coding.
Anthropic unveiled a new suite of Claude-powered medical AI admin tools for medical use by consumer health care providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies, available through various integrations with certified health tech platforms.
However, the growing number of AI-powered health tools has sparked privacy concerns while also highlighting the risk of hallucinations, which could lead to inaccurate or misleading medical information. Google’s AI overviews, which appear at the top of search results, wrongly advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods, according to a recent report by The Guardian. Experts pointed out that the AI-generated health tip may increase the risk of patients dying from the disease, the report added.
Claude for Healthcare Explained.
The Cloud for Healthcare Anthropic said it has partnered with California-based HealthEx to let patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems and use the cloud AI chatbot to answer questions related to their personal health. Paper integration at this layer is enabled by what Anthropic calls Connectors, tools that allow users to give Claude direct access to other platforms. They are also designed to help healthcare providers with tasks such as speeding up prior support requests, claims, and appeals processing, and triaging patient messages.
In the case of HealthEx, users first need to enable the HealthEx connector inside Claude (verify their identity and connect with their patient portal logins). HealthEx then unifies records across providers when they ask Claude a health-related question. The AI chatbot uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard developed by Anthropic for connecting AI to external data sources to retrieve information from the relevant portion of the patient’s medical records.
A similar partnership with Function Health lets users schedule lab tests and interpret their results in the Claude. These AI-powered features are currently only available to paid Cloud Pro and Mac subscribers living in the United States.
Anthropic also announced that Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations will be rolling out in beta this week via the Cloud, iOS, and Android apps.
Additionally, Anthropic said it has added connectors to industry-standard databases, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Coverage database, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed. Cloud can be used to retrieve data from clinical trial databases, metadata, and ClinicalTrials.gov medical research repositories, bioRxiv and medRxiv, drug targets database Open Targets, and ChemBL, a database of bioactive compounds that could be used to make drugs.
OpenAI vs. Anthropic
Anthropic’s healthcare push is strategic as health-related queries are reportedly among the most common use cases for AI chatbots. Physicians’ use of AI has nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024, with 68% admitting that AI gives them an advantage in caring for their patients, according to OpenAI.
Another survey commissioned by OpenAI found that 3 in 5 US adults used AI tools for their health or healthcare over the past 3 months, and 75% found them extremely helpful. Similar to Cloud for Healthcare, OpenAI’s recently announced ChatGPT for Health can analyze users’ medical records to give them better answers.
While OpenAI boasts more than 800 million weekly users, Anthropic has been less focused on serving the general consumer market and has prioritized capturing enterprise market share with advanced tools such as Claude Code. It has also rolled out more tailored versions of Claude for specialized sectors, such as Claude for Financial Services and Claude for Life Sciences.
