When OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health to help consumers send their health and wellness questions directly to its now-ubiquitous bot, the chief medical officer of the dominant electronic health record company tried to downplay its importance, pointing out that these tools should exist in people's medical records to be truly valuable.
This sentiment was recently echoed by one of OpenAI’s competitors, which launched its own version of a health chatbot.
“I think these tools have to be on surfaces that patients are already using every day, right?” Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s director of biology and life sciences, said in a recent interview in San Francisco. “As we grow, we'll also develop some new products and behaviors will change, but the EHR interface is definitely the primary home base for patients and it's critical that we get our products there.”
Interestingly, Cowler-Abrams declined to elaborate on what those products might be.
Anthropic wants healthcare players to know that it takes healthcare seriously and already has multiple partners – 25 names were showcased at a healthcare event in January, including companies like Abridge, Novo Nordisk, Genmab and Banner Health. But the company isn't just interested in providing foundational models that drive other people's healthcare innovations.
“The idea is that there is a model layer and then a product layer on top of that. We are making direct efforts at each layer,” he declared.
Among the many AI companies in healthcare, he said, Anthropic's ability to improve upon the underlying model is unique.
“So regardless of our partnerships with different groups, that’s a differentiator, and to some extent, being able to tune the performance of the model and get feedback from customers and say, ‘Hey, it works well in these areas. We want it to work better in these areas.’ That’s really powerful.” And then that’s our responsibility. Only we can truly change the model and launch better models in the future that perform better in these areas. “
Okay, so what about the product layer? While Kauderer-Abrams didn't reveal what “first-party” products the company will launch in the future, looking at the partners named so far, we can eliminate some areas where Anthropic will most likely not launch another, better widget.
For example, in the field of Ambient AI, Abridge is already a partner.
“I think our view is we want to develop products where we think there's a gap,” he explained. “If there's a great product that already serves certain use cases, like Abridge, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.”
Until then, Anthropic's goal, like other healthcare companies, is to apply its technology to help other healthcare companies do their jobs better. In early January, the company announced a partnership with Danish biotech Genmab to “deploy a custom agent AI solution powered by Claude” to support Genmab's clinical development workflow. For example, an AI agent can be used to create clinical trial documents (yes, human supervision is required), which Genmab can use to submit regulatory documents to the FDA.
In addition to helping healthcare companies do their jobs better, there appears to be at least an interest in using artificial intelligence to help areas with fewer resources get better healthcare. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, perhaps not as profit-driven as your average for-profit company—its stated core mission is to “responsibly develop advanced artificial intelligence for the long-term benefit of humanity, balancing profit with social good.”
If the company lives up to its mission, this could help rural America.
“We have Cloud with the capabilities of an expert physician and incorporate all the medical knowledge in the world. Now we can provide that capability to rural hospitals. So all of a sudden, rural hospitals don't have experts in certain key areas, but they just don't have them,” Cowdler-Abrams said. “For example, if you augment them with Claude, now you have that capability and it's certainly going to perform better than not having it at all. So we're actually just starting to do some collaboration in this area to try to deploy Claude's healthcare into these environments.”
In other words, stay tuned for more details on Anthropic's efforts to improve access to health care in rural America. Also applies to specific product launches, maybe even within your EHR application.
Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images
