AI lab Anthropic is making a big push into healthcare, launching Claude for Healthcare and expanding its life sciences offerings.
The announcement coincides with the start of this week’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco and comes just days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Health. This is no coincidence and reflects the growing competition among leading AI labs to build specialized products for lucrative industries such as healthcare, finance and coding.
Claude for Healthcare has announced a partnership with HealthEx, a startup that allows patients to view all their electronic medical records in one place and control access to that data. The collaboration includes a way for users to connect their personal medical records with Anthropic’s Claude to answer health-related questions using a chatbot.
“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 ask my doctor? How has this number changed over time?—and get answers based on their health history,” said Amol Avasare, head of product at Anthropic.
The announcements also include a similar set of connectors from Function Health, which helps patients order lab tests and interpret results, as well as a apple Health and Android Health Connect will be rolled out to beta testers next week. Connectors for HealthEx and Function Health are currently available to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the United States
Health-related queries are one of the primary consumer use cases for AI chatbots. But so far, Anthropic isn’t as focused on serving the general consumer market as its rival OpenAI, which has more than 800 million weekly users. Anthropic is thought to have far fewer consumer users, instead focusing on professional use cases that more naturally appeal to enterprise customers, such as software coding. According to several recent surveys, it is already ahead of OpenAI in enterprise market share. More recently, it has also created more customized versions of Claude to serve other industries or professional verticals, such as Claude for financial services and Claude for life sciences.
Anthropic said it is interested in serving consumers and large organizations, and today’s announcement targets both consumer and enterprise customers such as hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.
New products for healthcare providers, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies
The company said it is adding connectors to industry-standard databases, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Coverage Database, International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry and PubMed.
These connectors are designed to help healthcare providers with tasks such as expediting prior authorization requests, supporting claims appeals, coordinating care and triaging patient messages.
For life sciences companies, Anthropic is expanding its initial focus on preclinical research to support clinical trial operations and regulatory efforts. New connectors include Medidata for clinical trial data and Clinical Trial Network. It also launched connectors to bioRxiv and medRxiv, which are repositories of medical and biological research papers, often before their findings are peer-reviewed; Open Targets, a database of identified drug targets; and ChEMBL, a database of bioactive compounds that can be used to make drugs.
The company is working with major healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, SanofiGenmab, banner healthFlatiron Health and Veeva, among others. In a video clip provided to reporters by Anthropic, it shows how Crowder is now helping a pharmaceutical company design a Phase II clinical trial protocol for a hypothetical drug to treat Parkinson’s disease. It reduces the time required to draft a protocol design from many days to about an hour.
Let Claude use medical records to answer patient questions
One of the centerpieces of the new consumer health offering is a partnership with HealthEx, which helps patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems.
wealth The new product was discussed exclusively with executives from both companies.
“Today’s personal health records are fragmented across providers, making it difficult to get a complete view,” Abasare told wealth. “HealthEx has built a way to unify these records with user consent and strong controls using Claude. Users decide what is shared 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 within Claude, authenticate their identity, and connect to their patient portal login. HealthEx then unifies records across providers. When users ask Claude health-related questions, Claude uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard Anthropic developed for connecting AI to external data sources, to securely retrieve the relevant parts of the record for each specific question.
To enhance data privacy, Cloud only requests the categories of information most likely to be relevant to the problem, such as medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctor notes, rather than pulling the entire medical record. If the correlation isn’t obvious, Crowder can prompt the user to expand, asking if they want to look further into their history, Abasare said.
Priyanka Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of HealthEx, said the partnership solves 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 secure, private way to use their health data through artificial intelligence,” Agarwal told us wealth. “We know AI based on an individual’s context will deliver support more effectively.” By connecting medical records to HealthEx and HealthEx to Claude, she said, users will get “responses based on your health history rather than general advice.”
According to Anthropic, announcements in the healthcare and life sciences space were made possible due to recent improvements in Claude’s underlying capabilities. Anthropic’s latest model, the Claude Opus 4.5, performed significantly better than earlier versions when tested in simulations of real-world medical and scientific tasks. The company also said Opus 4.5 with Expanded Mind has improved on honestly assessed correct answers, reflecting progress in reducing factual illusions.