When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health to help consumers direct their health and wellness questions to its now ubiquitous bot, the chief medical officer of the dominant electronic health record company sought to downplay its significance, noting that these tools should live inside people’s medical records to be truly valuable.
Recently, one of OpenAI’s competitors — which followed suit with its own version of a chatbot for health — agreed with that sentiment.
“I think these tools must live in the surfaces that patients are already using every day, right?” said Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of biology and life sciences, Anthropic, in a recent interview in San Francisco. “As we go, we’re going to develop some new products too, and there will be a change in behavior, but certainly your EHR interface is the main home base for patients, and it’s critical that we bring our products there.”
Intriguing, though Kauderer-Abrams declined to elaborate on what those products could be.
What Anthropic wants healthcare players to know is that it is serious about healthcare and already has racked up several partners – 25 names were displayed at a healthcare event in January, the list including companies like Abridge, Novo Nordisk, Genmab and Banner Health. But the company is not just interested in providing the foundational models that will drive healthcare innovation by somebody else.
“The way that I think about it, there’s the model layer and then there’s the product layer on top of that. And we are making direct efforts in each of them,” he declared.
Among the sea of AI companies in healthcare, being able to improve the foundational model is what he said distinguishes Anthropic.
“And so regardless of the shape of the partnerships that we have with different groups, that’s one differentiating factor in that, at some level, it’s really powerful to be able to tune the model’s performance and get feedback from customers and say, ‘Hey, it’s working well for these things. We want it to be working better in these areas.’ And then that’s on us. Only we can go in and actually change the model, and in the future come out with better models that are better performing in these areas,” he said.
Ok, what about the product layer? While Kauderer-Abrams wouldn’t disclose what “first-party” products the company will introduce in the future, looking at the partners named thus far, one can eliminate certain areas in which Anthropic will most likely not introduce another, better widget.
In Ambient AI, for example, Abridge is already a partner.
“I think our perspective is we look to develop products where we see there’s a gap,” he explained. “If there’s a great product that’s already serving certain use cases, Abridge, for example, we don’t need to go and reinvent the wheel.”
Until then, Anthropic, like other companies in healthcare, is aiming to apply its tech to help other healthcare companies do their jobs better. In early January, the company announced that it is partnering with Genmab, the Danish biotech company, to “deploy custom, Claude-powered agentic AI solutions” to bolster Genmab’s clinical development workflows. For example, AI agents can be used to create clinical trial documentation (and yes, with a human to oversee) that Genmab can use to submit regulatory documents to the FDA.
Aside from helping healthcare companies do their jobs better, there appears to be at least some interest in helping areas with fewer resources get better healthcare access through AI. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation and perhaps not motivated toward a profit goal in the same way as a regular for-profit company is – its stated core mission is “the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, balancing profit with social good.”
That’s something that can help rural America if the company follows through on its mission.
“We have Claude that has capabilities of expert physicians and sort of all of the world’s medical knowledge baked into it. And now we could offer that to rural hospitals. So all of a sudden you have a rural hospital that doesn’t have specialists in certain areas that are critical, but they just don’t have them,” Kauderer- Abrams said. “If you augment them with Claude, for example, now you have this capability, and it’s certainly higher performing than not having it at all. And so we are actually just starting some engagements in exactly this area to try to deploy Claude for healthcare into these settings.”
In other words, stay tuned for more details on Anthropic’s foray into improving healthcare access in rural America. And also for specific product launches, maybe even inside your EHR app.
Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images
