Claude joins healthcare to assist doctors and explain patient data.

Anthropic has launched Claude for Healthcare, an opt-in feature that can connect to platforms like Apple Health and HealthEx to read lab results, fitness data and appointment notes. The company says the tool offers HIPAA-compliant features for clinicians to help with prior authorizations, claims appeals and other administrative tasks.

Anthropic has introduced Claude for Healthcare and is inviting U.S. users to allow the assistant to access selected personal health data. With permission, Claude can connect to platforms such as HealthEx, Function, Apple Health and Android Health Connect to read lab tests, fitness metrics and appointment notes. The feature is offered to Claude Pro and Max subscribers and includes tools Anthropic describes as HIPAA-compliant for use by clinicians. The announcement arrives shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT Health and positions Claude as both a patient-facing explainer and an administrative aid. Key points: - Claude can, with user consent, pull in lab results, fitness metrics and doctor notes from connected platforms to produce plain-language explanations and summaries. - The feature is opt-in; Anthropic says users choose what Claude can see, access can be revoked, and the company does not use that data to train future models. - For clinicians, Claude for Healthcare is presented as a HIPAA-compliant tool to streamline prior authorizations, claims appeals and care coordination by connecting to sources such as Medicare's Coverage Database. - Claude integrates with healthcare coding and provider systems, including ICD-10 codes and the National Provider Identifier Registry, and can be linked to PubMed in enterprise environments to retrieve relevant literature. - The Claude Developer Platform is enabling third-party apps, including ambient note-taking, lightweight triage assistants and chart review tools that aim to reduce clinician documentation burden. Summary: Anthropic positions Claude for Healthcare as a system that both translates patient data for users and helps providers reduce administrative work by connecting to U.S. health data sources and coding registries. The company highlights privacy controls and HIPAA-oriented features as central to the rollout. Whether the initiative gains broad adoption will depend on provider uptake and how Anthropic maintains privacy and transparency. Undetermined at this time.