The announcement made at the JP Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco this week marks Anthropic’s industry response in the healthcare AI market after ChatGPT Health. It highlights the growing competition among top AI health platforms to develop specialized tools for industries such as healthcare, finance, and coding.
Claude for healthcare launches with HealthX, allowing users to view and control their electronic medical records, and use Claude to answer health-related questions by connecting data to Anthropic’s cloud.
HealthX lets users bring records into Claude, ask questions in plain language, and get answers based on their health history, said Amol Avasare.
The announcements also introduce connectors for Function Health, which help patients schedule lab tests and interpret results. Integrations with Apple Health and Android Health Connect will be available to better testers next week. Currently, the HealthX and Function Health connectors are available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US.
Health-related queries are among the top use cases for AI chatbots. Unlike OpenAI Healthcare, which focuses on the broad consumer market, Anthropic targets specialized enterprise solutions for healthcare and other industries. Recent surveys show Anthropic gaining on an enterprise market lead, reflecting its focus on tailored applications such as those for financial services and life sciences.
Anthropic aims to serve both individual customers and large organizations. The market timing of today’s announcements demonstrates this approach, targeting both patients and industry players, including hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies.
Services For Healthcare Providers, Insurance Companies, And Pharmaceutical Firms
The company said it was adding connectors to industry-standard databases, including: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage database, which contains insurance coverage rules; the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), a standardized system for coding and classifying medical diagnoses; the National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry, a nationwide directory of healthcare providers; and PubMed, a database containing biomedical and health research articles.
These connectors help healthcare providers expedite prior authorization requests, support claims appeals, coordinate care, and triage patient messages.
Anthropic is expanding its support for life sciences companies beyond pre-clinical research to include clinical trial operations and regulatory work. New connectors include Medidata, which manages clinical trial data; and ClinicalTrials.gov, a source for information about publicly and privately supported clinical studies. Additional connectors will provide access to bioRxiv and MedRxiv, which are repositories for medical and biological research papers before peer review. The connectors may also access OpenTargets, a database of drug targets, and ChemBL, a database of bioactive compounds used in drug development.
Anthropic is working with companies like AstraZeneca, Sanofi, GenMab, Banner Health, Flatiron Health, and Viva. In a demo, Claude shortened a Parkinson’s trial protocol draft from days to an hour.
A key feature of the new consumer health products is the partnership with HealthX, which helps patients consolidate medical records from over 50,000 health systems.
The executives from both companies outlined the new offering during an interview with Fortune. Today, National Health Records are scattered across providers, making it difficult to get a complete view. Avasare told Fortune that HealthX built a way to use the cloud to unify those records with strong user controls. Users can decide what to share and revoke access at any time, and their health data is never used to train the model.
Users enable the HealthX connector inside Claude (through identity verification and connecting their patient portal logins). HealthX then unifies records across healthcare providers so that when users ask Claude health-related questions, the chatbot can access relevant information. Claude uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open technical standard developed by Anthropic, to securely connect AI systems to external data sources, enabling them to retrieve relevant portions of a user’s medical record for each question.
To boost data privacy, CLAUDE only requests the categories of information most likely to be relevant to a question, such as medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctors’ notes, instead of retrieving the entire medical record. If the relevant information is unclear, CLAUDE can prompt users to expand the search, asking if they want to review a wider history, Avasare said.
We are giving every American a safe, private way to use their health data with AI. Agraval said that by connecting medical records to HealthX and HealthX to Claude, users will receive responses grounded in their health history rather than generic advice.
According to Anthropic, the healthcare and life sciences announcements are possible due to recent improvements to Claude’s underlying capabilities, as demonstrated by 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 and competitive positioning in producing correct answers on honesty evaluations. Reflecting progress on reducing factual hallucinations.
