Anthropic launches Claude for Healthcare

Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, a set of connectors and workflows aimed at providers, payers and life-sciences companies, days after OpenAI unveiled a competing healthcare product. New connectors gave Claude access to the CMS Coverage Database for checking Medicare requirements and prior authorisations, ICD-10 diagnosis and procedure codes, the National Provider Identifier registry, and more than 35 million papers indexed on PubMed, alongside new packaged “skills” for reviewing prior-authorisation requests and drafting FHIR-compliant records. Anthropic said the tools could speed up prior-authorisation reviews that otherwise took hours and help consolidate patient records, policies and guidelines for claims appeals.

A parallel Claude for Life Sciences push added connectors to clinical-trial and drug-discovery resources including Medidata, ClinicalTrials.gov, bioRxiv, ChEMBL and Open Targets, aimed at regulatory submissions and trial operations. Anthropic named early users and partners across both product lines, including Banner Health, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Genmab, Flatiron Health, Premier and Commure. Separately, US subscribers to Claude’s Pro and Max consumer plans were offered the option to connect their own lab results and health records, via services including HealthEx, Function and (later) Apple Health and Android Health Connect, so Claude could summarise medical history and explain test results in plain language.

The launch made explicit what had already been visible in Anthropic’s enterprise sales pitch: healthcare, with its dense regulatory documentation and high-stakes but text-heavy workflows, had become one of the more contested verticals between the two companies, following directly on OpenAI’s own healthcare-specific product announced the same month.