Anthropic expands Claude for healthcare and life sciences with HIPAA-ready connectors
Anthropic detailed new Claude for Healthcare connectors and agent skills, plus additional life sciences tooling. The update also highlights Claude Opus 4.5 benchmark gains and new consumer health-record integrations.
Yesterday (Jan 11, 2026), Anthropic published an update expanding Claude for Healthcare alongside additional Claude for Life Sciences capabilities aimed at medical and research workflows. The announcement is framed around Claude Opus 4.5, which Anthropic says is a step forward on agentic evaluations of medical and scientific task simulations.
For healthcare operations, Anthropic says Claude can connect to the CMS Coverage Database (Local and National Coverage Determinations), ICD-10, and the National Provider Identifier Registry to support prior authorization checks, billing-related coding, and provider verification. Anthropic also says HIPAA-compliant organizations using Claude for Enterprise can use the existing PubMed connector, which it describes as providing access to more than 35 million pieces of biomedical literature. The update adds two Agent Skills: a FHIR development skill and a sample prior authorization review skill intended to be customized for organizational policies.
For individuals, Anthropic says US Claude Pro and Max subscribers can opt in to connect lab results and health records using beta HealthEx and Function connectors, with Apple Health and Android Health Connect integrations rolling out in beta this week via the Claude iOS and Android apps. Anthropic says users can choose what data to share, change or revoke permissions at any time, and that health data is not used to train models.