OpenAI, the company known for its ChatGPT model, is considering entering the consumer health app market. According to sources close to the company, the possibilities include a generative AI-powered personal health assistant or a health data aggregator. This information comes after the hiring of key people with experience in medicine and technology. For example, in June, Nate Gross, co-founder of the publicly traded healthcare technology company Doximity, joined to lead its healthcare strategy. Two months later, Ashley Alexander joined from Instagram as vice president of health products.
ChatGPT has approximately 800 million weekly active users worldwide, and many of them ask health-related questions. At the HLTH conference in October, Nate Gross highlighted this enormous reach and suggested that OpenAI sees an opportunity in how people seek answers to medical questions. The company has not yet officially commented on these plans, but investors such as Greg Yap of Menlo Ventures see great potential in them. People used to turn to Google with health questions, but now they are turning to large language models for conversational answers.
Tech Companies' Previous Failures with Health Apps
Large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent decades trying to give people control over their health data, but many projects have failed. For example, Microsoft launched HealthVault in 2007 but shut it down in 2019 because it failed to attract enough users—mainly because patients had to upload their records manually. Google met a similar fate: its 2008 project ended in 2012, and the company later faced regulatory scrutiny over how it accessed patient data.
Apple still offers the Health Records feature on iPhones, but it requires hospitals to sign data-sharing agreements, which complicates access. Greg Yap explains that these systems suffer from friction because people have to log in to each portal, download their data, and share it manually. Without this data, information cannot be personalized. Jennifer Yoo, a healthcare regulatory partner at Fenwick & West, notes that many companies are now using AI to build personal health assistants that would bring together patient records to provide personalized support.
Health data privacy rules and financial incentives keep information scattered among different doctors. The idea behind a personal health record is to collect all this data in one place owned and managed by the patient. OpenAI could compete with Alphabet's Verily division, which released its own AI-powered personal health record app in October.
OpenAI's Approach to Data
OpenAI does not currently support users uploading health data and is cautious about how people use ChatGPT for health information. In August, when GPT-5 was released, CEO Sam Altman said that health is one of ChatGPT's primary use cases and that the new model helps people understand their health situation and make decisions. The company has updated its usage policies, which state that its products cannot be used for diagnosis or treatment in place of a doctor, but they still allow general medical information.
Instead of processing health records directly, OpenAI could follow the model of Apple HealthKit from 2014, which collects data from third-party apps and wearable devices such as the Apple Watch. Nate Gross spoke at an HLTH panel about an extensive ecosystem of partners for achieving the greatest benefit. Investors suggest partnerships with companies such as Superpower or Function Health, which specialize in laboratory testing.
Health Gorilla and Particle Health act as intermediaries between healthcare systems and patients—they retrieve records from multiple sources, clean and standardize them, and share them upon request. Jennifer Yoo recommends that AI companies work with such intermediaries to avoid the difficulties of obtaining data manually. A recent federal ban on "information blocking" prevents hospitals from withholding data, but in practice, many still restrict what patients can download.
Source: businessinsider.com
