Anthropic follows OpenAI into healthcare: how do their platforms compare?
Two San Francisco AI competitors — Anthropic and OpenAI, makers of widely used large-scale language models Claude and ChatGPT, respectively — have both announced major moves into health care in the days leading up to this year's J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
Last Wednesday, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a dedicated health experience within ChatGPT that combines users’ personal health information with the company’s artificial intelligence, promising to help people better manage their health and wellness. The next day, the company launched OpenAI for Healthcare, a suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to help healthcare providers reduce administrative burnout and improve care.
Anthropic made waves in the healthcare world on Sunday when it announced a new suite of Claude tools. The company is releasing new agent capabilities for tasks such as prior authorization, healthcare billing and clinical trial workflows, and will let users connect and query their personal medical records to get summaries, explanations and guidance of doctor visits.
Both companies have a niche in healthcare AI, but each has taken a slightly different path.
Product scope and positioning
In October, Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences, a chatbot-style research partner for biotech teams. This week's release of Claude for Healthcare builds on its first foray into healthcare, expanding Claude's capabilities to support hospitals, payers and patients.
ChatGPT Health by OpenAI is a consumer-facing experience within ChatGPT that connects personal medical records and health applications. The company separately launched OpenAI for Healthcare, which focuses on serving clinicians, healthcare managers and medical researchers.
The enterprise and consumer elements of OpenAI are related but different products with different access paths, while Anthropic brings industry and consumer tools together in a single platform.
Use cases
Anthropic and OpenAI have both released tools to help everyday consumers better understand their personal health journeys. As for tools designed specifically for healthcare organizations, Claude can assist with administrative and operational tasks such as prior authorization, billing, coding, claims verification, provider verification, and CMS policy lookups. The platform also supports life sciences and clinical trial workflows such as protocol drafting, data monitoring and recruitment.
OpenAI says its healthcare tools are designed to help clinicians and healthcare administrators with tasks such as documentation, prior authorization, clinical reasoning, evidence synthesis and daily operational workflows.
visits and clients
ChatGPT Health isn’t immediately available to everyone — OpenAI is rolling out access to users via a waitlist. For the OpenAI for Healthcare product, early health system partners have begun piloting the platform, including Cedars-Sinai, HCA Healthcare, Baylor Scott & White Health, and Boston Children's Hospital.
Anthropic's Pro and Max subscribers can already connect their medical records and query them in Claude. Healthcare organization customers include Banner Health, Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, Heidi Health, Elation Health and Viz.ai.
Personal health data integration
Anthropic has direct data integrations with HealthEx and Function Health, and says Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations are coming soon. The startup made it clear that personal data will not be used for model training and that users can revoke access.
ChatGPT Health lets users connect their medical records and health apps such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal, and OpenAI also emphasizes privacy and keeping health data separate from other ChatGPT memory and training.
Photo: ChatGPT
