OpenAI on Wednesday unveiled ChatGPT Health, a dedicated health experience within ChatGPT that combines a user’s personal health information with the company’s AI — with the promise of helping people better manage their health and wellness.
Below are five things to know about the announcement.
There’s a clear demand for this solution
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OpenAI reports that more than 230 million people globally ask ChatGPT about health and wellness each week. The company’s new service seeks to build on that demand by offering a more structured, secure way for users to engage with health-related information.
“To make an even greater impact, we need to make it much easier for anyone to discover what’s possible with ChatGPT and get the full value out of it for their health. For example, it’s a pain to go through several different health systems, figure out how to download your files, and then upload them all into ChatGPT,” stated Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, in a Tuesday Substack post.
ChatGPT Health is designed to enable more personalized health conversations
ChatGPT Health is a dedicated space for users’ health conversations in which they can connect their medical records, as well as data from wellness apps like Apple Health, Function Health, Peloton and MyFitnessPal.
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This gives ChatGPT the ability to offer more relevant, personalized support. For example, users can ask questions to help understand recent lab results, get help preparing for a visit with their physician or receive daily health guidance tailored to their diet, activity level and health history.
“ChatGPT Health is another step toward turning ChatGPT into a personal super-assistant that can support you with information and tools to achieve your goals across any part of your life,” Simo declared in her post.
OpenAI also emphasized that the new platform is not intended for medical diagnosis or treatment. The company is positioning it as support for personal health navigation rather than a clinical service.
The service is designed with privacy in mind
OpenAI stressed that its new offering allows health chats to live in a separate, secure space with enhanced protections, such as encryption and dedicated memory. The company also noted that these health conversations won’t be used to train OpenAI’s foundation models.
OpenAI tapped b.well to serve as the underlying connectivity layer for this new service — enabling ChatGPT Health users to securely link their medical records and other health data to the platform with “consumer-controlled consent,” meaning that individuals can decide which information is shared, how it’s used and can revoke access at any time, explained b.well CEO Kristen Valdes.
“We believe in informed consent. We believe in the consumer being completely in charge, and they have the right to direct their data in any way that they want. They also have the right to take that data away,” she declared.
In her eyes, this partnership reflects a shift toward meeting consumers where they already are — as patients increasingly turn to large language models for health information between clinical visits.
Valdes said b.well’s role is to give those conversations greater context by allowing users to connect as much or as little of their own health data as they choose — helping reduce what she called “portalitis,” or the fragmentation created by dozens of disconnected patient portals.
Physicians helped guide the development of the new platform
When building and evaluating ChatGPT Health, OpenAI collaborated with hundreds of physicians worldwide to make sure its responses are useful and responsibly framed.
OpenAI said this physician feedback informed how the platform presents information, including when to encourage users to seek professional care.
It’s being rolled out in phases
The new offering is initially only available to a small group of early users, but OpenAI is encouraging consumers to join a waitlist.
The company said the platform should be broadly available in the coming weeks.
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