Anthropic Launches Claude for Healthcare
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, comes just days after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Health. It also comes days after reports surfaced that the company is raising $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation.
The offering marks Anthropic's continued foray into regulated, high-stakes clinical environments. Claude for Healthcare features HIPAA-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers, models trained specifically for healthcare and life sciences tasks, and native integrations to commonly-used medical and scientific databases, including the CMS Coverage Database, ICD-10 codes, and PubMed.
Claude now lets users share information from their official medical records and fitness apps such as Apple's iOS Health, so it can engage in more personalized conversations regarding their health. The new features are available now for Claude Pro and Max plan subscribers in the U.S.
The 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 them. 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.
The healthcare and life sciences sector represents one of Anthropic's largest bets, according to Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic.
"When navigating through health systems and health situations, you often have this feeling that you're sort of alone and that you're tying together all this data from all these sources," Kauderer-Abrams told NBC News.
The HIPAA-ready infrastructure means Claude can connect to federal healthcare coverage databases, the federal registry of medical providers, and other services to help make the lives of physicians easier. The chatbot can help with time-consuming tasks such as preparing prior authorization requests for specialist care, or prepare the ground for insurance appeals by matching patient records with clinical guidelines.
For life sciences companies, Anthropic is expanding beyond its initial focus on preclinical research to support clinical trial operations and regulatory work. New connectors include Medidata for clinical trial data and ClinicalTrials.gov. The company is also launching connectors to bioRxiv and medRxiv, Open Targets, and ChEMBL.
At the heart of this expansion is Claude Opus 4.5. While previous models were impressive conversationalists, Opus 4.5 is built for agency, with the ability to plan and execute multi-step workflows. In medical benchmarks, the model has shown a significant leap in "extended thinking" using up to 64k tokens of context, allowing it to process dense medical records and regulatory guidelines.
Early adopters include Banner Health, Stanford Healthcare, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, AbbVie, and Genmab. These organizations use Claude to automate administrative workflows like clinical documentation, regulatory submissions, and clinical trial analysis.
Anthropic is launching with a partner ecosystem including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and consulting giants like Accenture and Deloitte, ensuring that these tools can be integrated into existing enterprise workflows.
Anthropic has stressed that these integrations are "private by design." Users can choose exactly what information they want to share with Claude, must explicitly opt in to enable access, and can disconnect or edit Claude's permissions at any time.