Sources close to OpenAI told Business Insider that OpenAI is considering creating its own health tools for consumers. Various possibilities are being explored, such as creating a personal health assistant or a medical data aggregator.
OpenAI's entry into the health sector is one of the company's boldest steps – moving beyond AI infrastructure towards industry-specific software. After transforming the way companies create new technologies with generative AI, OpenAI is now aiming to launch its own applications in sectors dominated by traditional giants – from sales and marketing to law and perhaps now medicine.
OpenAI declined to comment on this matter.
Recent employment shows the company's ambitious plans in the health area. In June, OpenAI hired Nate Gross, co-founder of public healthtech firm Doximity, to lead its health strategy. Two months later, Instagram's Ashley Alexander joined the team as vice president of health products. At the HLTH conference in October, Gross pointed to OpenAI's enormous reach — ChatGPT has about 800 million weekly active users, many of whom ask medical questions.
This scale has healthcare founders and investors closely watching OpenAI's next steps.
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“Consumers have historically turned to Google for health-related questions, and now they are clearly starting to shift those questions to LLM for insight in a more conversational discovery process,” said Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures, which is not an OpenAI investor. “I think OpenAI has a huge opportunity in this sector.”
Several investors told Business Insider they believe OpenAI could solve a problem that has been vexing Big Tech for years: personal health records.
US health data privacy regulations and financial mechanisms mean that medical data is scattered across various facilities where a patient has ever been treated. The idea of a personal health database is to collect this information in one place, managed by the patient.
This is a difficult problem to solve, but technology keeps trying. If OpenAI decides to build a personal health assistant with consolidated health records, it will compete with Alphabet's Verily, which released its own AI-powered app in October.
OpenAI has been largely silent on its healthcare plans. But the company's explosive growth and dominance in basic artificial intelligence have some investors concerned that the AI giant has a better shot than many previous Big Tech entrants at building transformative health technology and trampling startup competition.
“Amazon is a great company, but it has one foot in healthcare and one foot outside of healthcare. Microsoft, kind of the same way. We didn't see the same behavior with OpenAI and Anthropic. It was a full-throttle pedal-down, aggressive, let's look at everything, let's talk to everyone. So I would say I see them much more as a serious potential threat,” said Blake Wu, a partner at NEA, which is not an investor in OpenAI or Anthropic.
ChatGPT has approximately 800 million weekly active users worldwide, many of whom use the platform to ask health-related questions.
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The problem of personal medical records
Jennifer Yoo, a partner in health care regulatory affairs at Fenwick & West, says she sees many companies using artificial intelligence to create personal health assistants, often with the hope of connecting a patient's medical records for tailored support.
However, these companies are following the trail blazed by previous Big Tech projects in the field of health.
Microsoft, Google and Apple have all tried to create personal health records for consumers, with mixed results. Microsoft's HealthVault was launched in 2007 but was shut down in 2019 after failing to gain popularity among users, mainly because required patients to manually submit medical records.
Google's efforts followed a similar path, with a 2008 medical records project folding in 2012, only for the company to begin work a few years later on an electronic health records search tool that came under fire from regulators over how Google accessed and processed patient data. Apple still offers a native Health Records feature on iPhones, but the service requires hospitals to sign data-sharing agreements so patients can connect their records to the app.
“Apple's health record and each of them, which involves logging into each portal, downloading and manually sharing data, is a friction that prevents people from getting value from their own health data,” Yap said. “AI suffers from this friction just like anyone else. You can't personalize information if you don't have the data.”
The good news: some of these challenges are starting to subside. The recent federal “information blocking” ban prevents hospitals from keeping health records locked away or preventing people from accessing their own records. In practice, however, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has found that many hospitals still limit what patients can download.
Companies like Health Gorilla and Particle Health have become intermediaries between health systems and patients, pulling records from multiple sources, cleaning and standardizing data, and making it available to third-party applications upon patient request. Yoo suggested that companies seeking to develop AI health assistants with built-in health records would be wise to work with an intermediary to avoid the headache of manually retrieving records.
Consumers are also more willing than ever to take control of their health, including their health data. When OpenAI released GPT-5 in August, CEO Sam Altman said health was one of ChatGPT's main use cases and boasted that the new model “can help you understand your healthcare and make decisions about your journey.”
“They already use ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to ask health questions. I think users see the value of, 'hey, if this also had all my long-term medical records, how much better information would it be for me?'” Yoo said.
OpenAI's partnership approach
OpenAI does not yet encourage users to submit their medical data and is proceeding cautiously as more users use ChatGPT to obtain health information.
Viral posts circulating in early November, including a now-deleted post from the startup Kalshi, suggested that ChatGPT would no longer provide health advice. This was a misinterpretation of OpenAI principles. The company's recently updated terms of use tell consumers not to use its products to perform the work of a doctor, including diagnosis or treatment, but the policy does not preclude ChatGPT from offering general medical information. The head of health artificial intelligence research at OpenAI said the company has not changed its models.
If OpenAI avoids handling health records directly, it could take a different page from Apple's health data playbook. Apple's Healthkit, launched in 2014, collects health and fitness data from third-party apps and wearables like Apple Watches and centralizes that information in its Health app.
OpenAI may partner with other health companies to collect this data. As Gross said during the HLTH panel, “I think the way we're going to do the most good is to have a solid ecosystem of partners.” Investors have pointed to consumer lab testing companies such as Superpower and Function Health as potentially attractive health partners for OpenAI.
While some investors want OpenAI to delve deeper into consumer health, the AI giant is delving into the healthcare sector from multiple angles. Gross's early mandate includes co-creating new health care technologies with clinicians and researchers, while Alexander creates health care products for both clinicians and individual consumers. OpenAI already works with pharmaceutical giants such as Eli Lilly and Sanofi on drug discovery and development, as well as with healthtech companies such as Penda Health on clinical decision support using artificial intelligence. OpenAI is also acquiring ChatGPT enterprise agreements and other partnerships with health systems.
Meanwhile, the latest wave of VC investment in healthcare has gone directly into AI tools that automate administrative work, especially for physicians and healthcare systems. OpenAI's vendor-focused projects could also undermine those bets, another sign that AI giants are steadily moving into startup territory.
