Experts have endorsed the release of ChatGPT Health for health consultations, despite the risks of hallucinations associated with neural networks. This was reported by TechCrunch.

Dr. Sina Bari, a practicing surgeon and head of AI initiatives at iMerit, shared an experience where a patient consulted ChatGPT:

“Recently, he came to me after I recommended a medication and showed me a printed dialogue with the chatbot. It stated that there was a 45% chance of developing pulmonary artery thromboembolism.”

Dr. Bari checked the sources and found that the statistic was taken from a study about the drug's effects on a niche subgroup of people with tuberculosis. This data was not applicable to his clinical case.

Despite the inaccuracies, the doctor viewed the launch of ChatGPT Health positively. He believes the service allows users to discuss health issues in a more private setting.

“I think it's great. This is already happening, so formalizing the process to protect patient information and implementing some safety measures will make it more effective for patients,” said Dr. Bari.

Users can receive more personalized recommendations from ChatGPT Health by uploading medical records and syncing the app with Apple Health and MyFitnessPal. This level of access to personal information has raised concerns in the community.

“Suddenly, medical data is being transferred from HIPAA-compliant organizations to providers that are not. It will be interesting to see how regulators respond to this,” noted Itai Schwartz, co-founder of MIND.

Over 230 million people discuss their health issues with ChatGPT weekly. Many have stopped “googling” symptoms, opting for the chatbot as their source of information.

“This is one of the largest use cases for ChatGPT. So it makes sense that they would want to create a more private, secure, and optimized version of the chatbot for health inquiries,” emphasized Schwartz.

The Hallucination Problem

The main issue with chatbots remains “hallucinations,” which is particularly critical in healthcare. A study by Vectara showed that OpenAI's GPT-5 “hallucinates” more frequently than competitors from Google and Anthropic.

However, Dr. Nigam Shah, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, considers these concerns secondary. He believes the real issue is the difficulty of accessing doctors, rather than the risk of receiving incorrect advice from ChatGPT.

“Right now, if you go to any healthcare system and want to see a primary care doctor, you’ll have to wait three to six months. If you have the choice: wait six months to see a real specialist or talk to someone who can do something for you right away, what would you choose?” he noted.

Administrative tasks can take up about half of a doctor's time, significantly reducing the number of patients they can see. Automating these processes will allow specialists to focus more on patient care.

Dr. Shah leads a team at Stanford developing ChatEHR, software designed to help doctors work efficiently with patients' electronic medical records.

“By making it more user-friendly, doctors will spend less time searching for the information they need,” said Dr. Sneha Jain, one of the first testers of ChatEHR.

In January, Anthropic announced the release of Claude for Healthcare—a toolkit for healthcare providers and patients.