AI lab Anthropic is making a major push into healthcare with the launch of Claude for Healthcare and an expansion of its life sciences offerings.
The announcement, timed to coincide with the start of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week, comes just days after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Health. That’s no coincidence and reflects the growing competition among leading AI labs to build specialized products for lucrative industries like healthcare, finance, and coding.
The Claude for Healthcare announcements include a partnership with HealthEx, a startup that allows patients to see all of their electronic medical records in a single place and control access to that data. The partnership includes a way for users to connect their personal medical records to Anthropic’s Claude in order to use the chatbot to answer health-related questions.
The company said it was adding connectors to industry-standard databases including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the National Provider Identifier Registry, and PubMed.
These connectors are designed to help healthcare providers with tasks like speeding up prior authorization requests, supporting claims appeals, coordinating care, and triaging patient messages.
Among the centerpieces of the new consumer health offerings is the partnership with HealthEx, which can help patients consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 health systems.
Fortune talked with executives from both companies exclusively about the new offering.
“Personal health records today are scattered across providers, and it can be difficult to get a complete view,” Avasare told Fortune. “HealthEx built a way to use Claude to unify those records with user consent and strong controls. Users decide what to share and can revoke access at any time, and their health data is never used for model training.”
Users enable the HealthEx connector inside Claude, verify their identity, and connect their patient portal logins. HealthEx then unifies records across providers. When users ask Claude health-related questions, Claude uses Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard Anthropic developed for connecting AI to external data sources—to securely retrieve relevant portions of the record for each specific question.
To enhance data privacy, Claude requests only the categories of information most likely to be relevant to a question—such as medications, allergies, recent lab reports, or doctor notes—rather than pulling an entire medical record. If relevance isn’t obvious, Claude can prompt users to broaden the scope, asking if they want to look further back in their history, Avasare said.
Priyanka Agarwal, cofounder and CEO of HealthEx, said the partnership addresses 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 safe, private way for them to use their health data with AI,” Agarwal told Fortune. “We know that AI based on personal context is going to be more effective at providing support.” She said that by connecting medical records to HealthEx and HealthEx to Claude, users will get “responses [that] are grounded in your health history, not generic advice.”
According to Anthropic, the healthcare and life sciences announcements are possible because of recent improvements to Claude’s underlying capabilities. When tested on 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 shows improvements in producing correct answers on honesty evaluations, reflecting progress on reducing factual hallucinations.
