ChatGPT Health will see you Now, and the Greatest Step Forward for Medical Questions
I spent a lot of time unexpectedly sick in hospitals and doctors’ offices this summer, so, as a reporter covering AI, I was well prepared to test the new version of ChatGPT Health.
ChatGPT Health is a unique experience within a chatbot, designed with strict privacy and security rules to help answer various health questions. Available today in the US for free and paid personal ChatGPT accounts for people over 18 on the web and iOS. It was first announced in January in beta.
I had my appendix removed earlier this summer, and a lot of post-op complications kept me miserable for a few weeks. I’m feeling a lot better these days, thankfully, and I knew that the bucketload of digital papers I’d collected would come in handy during my early access to the program.
As with any AI program, the more information you are willing to provide, the better the results. You can connect your Apple Health account to ChatGPT, as well as your electronic health record for many different providers. The idea is to have all your health information, from your doctor’s notes to data to information from your Apple Watch and Oura ring, all integrated within ChatGPT. This can be useful for people who have multiple health records, such as people with chronic illnesses, or those whose records are spread across hospitals and doctors’ offices.
OpenAI says it doesn’t use your linked health information to train its underlying models or ads. You can request that your data be deleted, set a limited time window during which ChatGPT Health has access to your external accounts and terminate each account as needed. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’ copyrights in training and using its AI programs.)
However, there will be situations where you don’t want to share your most sensitive data. Tech companies have a history of cooperating with law enforcement, and as some governments roll out highly politicized health care policies that criminalize certain procedures, such as abortion and gender-affirming care, you may want to keep your most sensitive information offline. ChatGPT Health is not HIPAA compliant, which means you don’t have the kind of privacy you have with your doctor.
Setting up ChatGPT Health
I connect ChatGPT to one of my patient portals, select a provider from the list and log into my account, going through the usual two-factor authentication process. I was then asked to select my current health conditions and medications from the rules I found in my electronic health record, as well as to detail any family health history.
ChatGPT pulled in a lot of duplicate data — common names and prescriptions for the same drug, for example — so I had to double-check its results. The whole process took less than five minutes.
More than 300 million people ask ChatGPT health-related questions every week, OpenAI said on Thursday, which is a huge increase from the 40 million questions it reported in January. But surprisingly, most of those queries (70%) occur without a dedicated Health tab. Now, once you set up ChatGPT Health, it will ask you if you allow the chatbot to use your health information to answer your question, wherever you are.
I asked ChatGPT a series of health questions, and each time I was surprised by the results. Her answers were clearly based on my medical history, always referencing lab results. I used it to think of a decent weekly meal plan and fitness regimen, based on my recovery phase. I was annoyed that it wanted me to connect multiple plugins before it could help me with an insurance question, but why should anything about insurance be straightforward?
Katelyn Chedraoui/CNETPerhaps most reassuringly, everything ChatGPT told me was what I had already been told by my doctors. This is done on purpose – ChatGPT is not supposed to diagnose problems or create treatment plans. It can explain those conditions very well, thanks to more than 260 doctors working with OpenAI. They reviewed over 700,000 AI responses over the past two years, in 49 languages and 26 medical specialties.
ChatGPT Health uses the company’s newest models, including the GPT-5.6 series. The new models, 5.5 and 5.6, are better at recognizing when urgent medical intervention is needed, asking for more information from you when necessary, and avoiding exaggeration in their responses. To put it another way, AI is better at knowing when its answers are not good enough and when to push you to seek out doctors for their human medical knowledge.
Managing health concerns with tech
Technology in healthcare is nothing new, and ChatGPT Health follows the growing trend of AI technology being used in the field, from insurance to charting to the laboratory and imaging software space. Microsoft introduced a similar tool called Copilot Health earlier this year. Many of my doctors are recording our conversations with AI so that the technology can write a summary of our visit (without my consent, I later learned).
But I’d be ashamed if I didn’t say that during my surgery and weeks of recovery, I only used the AI chatbot twice: Once to understand the scary lab report that came in at 11pm and once to prepare a doctor’s appointment to discuss the scary lab report. I have not used ChatGPT Health, but that experience only eased my anxiety. I was worried that the chatbot was funny – that is, doing things – or pulling from dirty sources on the Internet like Reddit.
The AI did a great job and tried to reassure me, but it didn’t replace the real human support I needed in those moments. Unsurprisingly, it was real people who made my experience bearable – my nurses, doctors, friends and family.
OpenAI, to its credit, doesn’t want its AI to replace any of these things. And its unique health experience, when linked to your data, is a big step up from regular chatbots. The development makes me wonder if I would have experienced less anxiety if ChatGPT Health had been available at the time. But like many telehealth innovations, I fear that ChatGPT Health is just another Band-Aid to put on the open wound that is the US health care system.
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