After dropping hints earlier this week, OpenAI has officially launched ChatGPT Health, which is designed to handle health, illness, and treatment-related questions with utmost care and responsibility. The company wants you to use this ChatGPT extension as your personal AI-powered health assistant.
According to OpenAI, more than 40 million people use ChatGPT daily to seek health-related guidance, such as curating a workout plan, getting help with diet changes, understanding the side effects of certain medications, identifying the symptoms of different diseases, and finding the right line of treatment.
Built to support professional medical care, not replace it
Rather than answering all those questions in the all-star home tab, ChatGPT wants you to ask them in the new Health section. “Health is designed to support, not replace, medical care,” OpenAI writes in its official release, suggesting the company is cautious about its claims and promises for the new tool.
When you ask the tool a health-related question, it routes the request through a curated pipeline that sources its information from authoritative medical content, uses conservative language, and includes expanded safety checks. The company says that it has worked with “more than 260 physicians” to understand how to handle health-related queries.
It also lets you upload your medical records or connect fitness-tracking apps like Apple Health for providing more personalized (and accurate) suggestions. For instance, you can ask Health about your cholesterol or blood sugar trends, and it can either draw information from the uploaded documents or a connected app to provide the required answer.
Moreover, you can use the tool to understand your blood or physical test results, prepare you for appointments with your doctor (highlight significant symptoms and curate an easy-to-share list), and even compare insurance plans based on your healthcare patterns.
The company also promises enhanced privacy in the Health section, stating that conversations there aren’t used to train AI models. For now, ChatGPT Health isn’t available for all users. Instead, the company gets you on a waitlist and informs you when you can access it.
“Users with ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans outside of the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom are eligible” to enter the waitlist. In the long term, OpenAI could deepen integrations with healthcare systems, insurers, and other wellness tools.