With Claude for Healthcare, Anthropic introduces a comprehensive healthcare-focused AI platform that reduces administrative burdens, improves access to information and supports professionals in complex decision-making. At its core are so-called connectors: links that give Claude secure and direct access to external, healthcare-specific data sources.
This introduction of Claude for Healthcare comes just days after ChatGPT Health was announced by competitor OpenAI. It was positioned as a separate service that brings together personal health information and generative AI within a strictly defined and secure environment. ChatGPT Health aims to better inform and prepare users for conversations about health and well-being, without replacing the role of healthcare professionals.
Smarter access to healthcare data
Anthropic explicitly positions Claude as an infrastructure layer for digital healthcare and life sciences. New connectors are available for healthcare providers and health insurers that connect to common standards and registrations. For example, Claude can retrieve information from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Coverage Database, including local and national reimbursement decisions. This supports authorisation processes, claim checks and appeal procedures, among other things. Integration is also possible with ICD-10 codes for diagnostics and procedures, and with the National Provider Identifier Registry for verification and credentialing of healthcare providers.
Because HIPAA-compliant organisations can now use Claude for Enterprise, existing medical data sources such as PubMed are also available. This allows Claude to quickly summarise literature and generate up-to-date evidence overviews.
Practical AI skills for healthcare processes
Anthropic is also adding new Agent Skills, including support for FHIR development to accelerate interoperability between healthcare systems. There is also a sample skill for assessing authorisation requests, which organisations can adapt to their own policies and work processes.
In practice, this means that Claude can help with time-consuming tasks such as assessing authorisation requests, compiling substantiated claims objections and triaging patient messages in portals. By combining information from guidelines, files and reimbursement rules, an integrated overview is created that supports decision-making without taking over.
Insight into your own health
In addition to professional applications, Claude also focuses on citizens. In the US, users of Claude Pro and Max can link their personal health data, including lab results and files, via HealthEx, Function and, in beta, Apple Health and Android Health Connect. Claude can summarise this data, explain results in understandable language and help prepare for consultations. Privacy is central to this: users explicitly choose which data they share, can always disconnect links and health data is not used to train AI models.
Claude is also expanding its role within the life sciences, with new connectors for clinical and translational research. Links to ClinicalTrials.gov, Medidata, bioRxiv/medRxiv and others make it possible to gain faster insight into trial design, inclusion, pipelines and preprint research. In addition, Claude supports early research through data sources such as ChEMBL and Open Targets, and image analysis through Owkin.
With new Agent Skills for bioinformatics, protocol development and data analysis, Claude is positioning itself as a digital co-pilot in the entire R&D chain: from hypothesis to clinical study.
Strategic significance
With Claude for healthcare and life sciences, Anthropic is focusing on AI as a connecting layer between fragmented data, regulations and daily practice. Not as a replacement for professionals, but as an accelerator of insight, collaboration and decision-making. For healthcare organisations, policymakers and innovators, this development emphasises how generative AI is increasingly shifting from experimentation to structural digital infrastructure.
