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Elation Health's electronic health records now use Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence engine for clinical insights, with physicians having access to the tool at no additional charge, the company said on Monday.
Patients can also use Claude to ask questions about their medical history across multiple providers through a connection with HealthEx, an application that pulls health data from more than 50,000 providers and labs into one unified profile through the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), according to a separate announcement on Monday.
WHY IT MATTERS
Elation said by integrating Claude AI into its EHR Clinical Insights engine, doctors are processing summaries of complete patient records and getting 61% faster answers.
Since the core engine was moved to Claude in November, use of the tool to summarize patient records with citations has doubled, the EHR vendor said.
Clinicians can also personalize their use of Elation's clinical AI tool. For example, they can summarize the last three patient visits with one click.
"By embedding Claude directly into Elation’s EHR, we’re able to deliver fast, cited chart insights that fit naturally into existing primary care workflows, support clinician judgment and meet the safety and reliability standards required in regulated healthcare environments," Zubair Jandali, Anthropic's healthcare and life sciences lead, said in a statement.
HealthEX, which launched a consumer‑directed data exchange last year using individual access services under TEFCA, said that, through a connector, Claude Pro and Max users can now ask Anthropic's AI for information about their medical records.
Personal health data is not used to train Anthropic's AI because privacy-driven architectures ensure records do not stay in Claude's AI's memory, according to the company. Claude uses a Model Context Protocol instead of downloading an entire medical file – it only retrieves the parts of patient records needed to answer the question a patient asks, HealthEx said.
While HealthEx verifies identity and offers real-time consent management with audit trails through CLEAR's NIST IAL2/AAL2-certified service, access to the Claude connector requires a government ID and biometrics.
Patients choose which categories, such as labs and medications, they want to give the AI access to, and they can also disconnect from Claude at any time, HealthEx said.
The companies said the new integration advances the Center for Medicare & Medicaid’s Health Technology Ecosystem initiative to connect federal interoperability infrastructure to AI capabilities.
THE LARGER TREND
This past year, Anthropic added voice mode in Claude. Stanford Healthcare said it used the Claude 3.5 Sonnet large language model (LLM) to generate more readable test result descriptions for patients to reduce the amount of time it takes physicians to explain test results. Its physicians also tested the LLM to write more empathetic patient letters.
Anthropic also announced on Monday that it launched Claude for Healthcare – HIPAA-ready tools that can be used for prior authorizations, patient care coordination and regulatory submissions that use its Opus 4.5 LLM.
Meanwhile, Anthropic's competitor, OpenAI, has made healthcare news of its own this month, with OpenAI launching ChatGPT for Healthcare at several large health systems and offering ChatGPT Health to consumers to upload their personal medical records and ask questions.
ON THE RECORD
"We chose Claude, powered by Anthropic, for the strength of its model and its reputation for responsible AI," said Kyna Fong, Elation Health Together cofounder and CEO, in a statement. "We’re using AI thoughtfully, not for novelty, but to deliver clinical-first intelligence that reduces burden, keeps physicians in control and moves primary care forward."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
