After OpenAI, Now Anthropic Introduces Claude for Healthcare AI Tools

Anthropic, on Sunday, introduced Claude for Healthcare, a set of custom artificial intelligence (AI) tools aimed at healthcare professionals and consumers seeking information in this area. The offerings include the chatbot powered by a custom Claude Opus 4.5 AI model, third-party integration, as well as agentic skills. The AI startup has also partnered with several hospitals and healthcare companies to help them adopt its latest offering. Interestingly, the announcement comes just a week after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Healthcare.

Anthropic Introduces Claude for Healthcare

In a newsroom post, the San Francisco-based AI firm announced and detailed Claude for Healthcare. With this, the company has taken a major step towards integrating medical AI capabilities with players in the industry. The latest offering is described as “a complementary set of tools and resources that allow healthcare providers, payers, and consumers to use Claude for medical purposes.”

Anthropic revealed that Claude Opus 4.5, the company's latest frontier model, was developed with medical performance in mind. Sharing its performance on the MedCalc and MedAgentBench benchmarks, it highlighted that Opus 4.5 has scored 61.3 and 92.3 percent, respectively. This model is also the backbone of Claude for Healthcare.

With Claude for Healthcare, professionals and consumers get access to Connectors, which are tools that let the chatbot access third-party platforms and retrieve information from their database. For professionals and healthcare institutions, this means that the AI can pull data from systems and databases to assist humans in generating reports.

Currently, Claude can connect with The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Coverage Database, the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, and the National Provider Identifier Registry. These platforms allow the chatbot to access locally-accurate coverage information, support authorisation checks, find diagnosis and procedure codes to support medical coding, and more.

Two new agent skills have also been added. First is the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) development, which allows Claude to use the modern standard for exchanging data between healthcare systems. The second is a sample prior authorisation revie skill, which provides a customisable template for organisational policies and work patterns, coverage requirements, clinical guidelines, and more.

With these tools, Anthropic's vision of Claude for Healthcare is primarily an administrative tool that can speed up reviews of prior authorisation requests, such as coverage requirements, clinical guidelines, patient records, and appeal documments. Typically, these requests can take a few hours, but the AI chatbot can complete them much faster in a way that's compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Additionally, it can also pull together information to build stronger appeals, support care teams in navigating patient portal messages, referrals, and handoffs, and support developers and startups build new products that use Claude to reduce the time of complex administrative processes in healthcare.

Finally, Anthropic has also introduced integration aimed at users who want to securely upload their health records and lab results with Claude. The AI chatbot currently supports HealthEx and Function via connectors in beta, whereas Apple Health and Android Health integrations will roll out this week via the company's iOS and Android apps.