Healthcare Life Sciences

Advancing Claude in healthcare and the life sciences \ Anthropic Announcements Advancing Claude in healthcare and the life sciences Jan 11, 2026 Watch on-demand

In October, we announced Claude for Life Sciences , our latest step in making Claude a productive research partner for scientists and clinicians, and in helping Claude to support those in industry bringing new scientific advancements to the public. Now, we’re expanding that feature set in two ways. First, we’re introducing Claude for Healthcare , a complementary set of tools and resources that allow healthcare providers, payers, and health tech companies and startups to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products. We're also introducing tools to help individuals understand and navigate their personal health data. Second, we’re adding new capabilities for life sciences: connecting Claude to more scientific platforms, and helping it provide greater support in areas ranging from clinical trial management to regulatory operations. These features build on top of major recent improvements we’ve made to Claude’s general intelligence. These improvements are best captured by evaluations of Claude’s agentic performance on detailed simulations of medical and scientific tasks, since this correlates most closely to real-world usefulness. Here, Claude Opus 4.5, our latest model, represents a major forward step:

Medical benchmark performance Key life sciences tasks SpatialBench: Spatial biology analysis by LatchBio *Claude 4.5 models evaluated with extended thinking (64k tokens) and native tool use MedCalc: Medical calculation accuracy (with Python code execution) MedAgentBench: Medical agent task completion ( Stanford )

Opus 4.5 model shows improvement in accuracy against our internal evaluation of key life sciences tasks (scientific figure interpretation, computational biology, and protein understanding) Source: LatchBio SpatialBench (Dec 2025) - 146 verifiable problems across 5 spatial problems and 7 task categories

In addition, Opus 4.5 with extended thinking improves on earlier Claude models in producing correct answers on our suite of honesty evaluations, reflecting the progress we’ve made on factual hallucinations. 1 With these model improvements and our new tools, Claude is now dramatically more useful for real-world healthcare and life sciences tasks. Ultimately, it’s those real-world outcomes that have motivated our work: these tools can be used to speed up prior authorization requests so that patients can get life saving care more quickly, can help with patient care coordination to reduce the pressures on clinicians' time, and help with regulatory submissions so that more life saving drugs can come to market faster. We discuss the practical ways that Claude can be used across these industries in more detail below. Introducing Claude for Healthcare What’s new Connectors are tools that allow users to give Claude access to other platforms directly. For payers and providers, we’ve added several connectors that make healthcare information easier to find, access, and understand. These allow Claude to pull information from industry-standard systems and databases, meaning that clinicians and administrators can save significant time finding the data and generating the reports they need. Claude can now connect to: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Coverage Database , including both Local and National Coverage Determinations. This enables Claude to verify locally-accurate coverage requirements, support prior authorization checks, and help build stronger claims appeals. This connector is designed to help revenue cycle, compliance, and patient-facing teams work more efficiently with Medicare policy. The International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10). Claude can look up both diagnosis and procedure codes to support medical coding, billing accuracy, and claims management. This data is provided by the CMS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The National Provider Identifier Registry , which allows Claude to help with provider verification, credentialing, networking directory management, and claims validation.

Since HIPAA-compliant organizations can now use Claude for Enterprise, they can also access existing healthcare-related connectors, including PubMed , which provides access to more than 35 million pieces of biomedical literature and allows Claude to quickly surface the latest research, and produce up-to-date literature reviews. Finally, we’ve added two new Agent Skills : FHIR development and a sample prior authorization review skill. FHIR is the modern standard for exchanging data between healthcare systems, and this skill helps to improve interoperability by enabling developers to connect them faster and with fewer errors. The prior authorization skill provides a template that can be customized to organizations’ policies and work patterns, helping with cross-referencing between coverage requirements, clinical guidelines, patient records, and appeal documents. Using Claude for healthcare tasks With these new tools, Claude can provide meaningful support for healthcare startups building new products, and for large enterprises looking to integrate AI more deeply into their operations. For example, Claude can: Speed up reviews of prior authorization requests . These requests can take hours to review, slowing patients’ access to care they need and frustrating payers and providers alike. Reviews require working across various fragmented sources of information, including coverage requirements, clinical guidelines, patient records, and appeal documents. Now, Claude can pull coverage requirements from CMS or custom policies, check clinical criteria against patient records in a HIPAA-ready manner, and then propose a determination with supporting materials for the payer’s review.

Support claims appeals . Denied claims cost time and money for all parties. By pulling together the necessary information from patient records, coverage policies, clinical guidelines and prior documentation, Claude helps providers build stronger appeals, and helps payers to process them more quickly. Coordinate care and triage patient messages. Claude can support care teams in navigating a large volume of patient portal messages, referrals, and handoffs. It can sort through these to identify what needs immediate attention, and to ensure that nothing gets inadvertently forgotten.…