The company wants you to download your medical records and connect the wellness apps you use.
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ChatGPT expands its presence in healthcare. OpenAI said Wednesday it was popular AI chatbot will begin rolling out ChatGPT Health, a new tab dedicated to processing all your medical requests. The goal of this new tab is to centralize all your medical files and provide a private space for your well-being issues.
Finding answers to a multitude of health concerns is one of the primary uses of chatbot. According to OpenAI, “hundreds of millions of people” connect to ChatGPT each week to ask a variety of questions about health and wellness. Additionally, ChatGPT Health (currently in beta) will encourage you to connect any wellness apps you use as well, such as Apple Health And MyFitnessPalresulting in a more connected experience with more information about you to draw on.
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What this means for your privacy
Online Privacyparticularly in the age of AI, is a major concern, and this announcement raises a series of questions about how your personal health data will be used and what safeguards will be implemented to ensure the security of sensitive information – especially with the proliferation of data breaches And data brokers.
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Health tab is a platform dedicated to all your medical requests.
OpenAI“The United States does not have a general privacy law, and HIPAA only protects data held by certain individuals, such as health care providers and insurance companies,” Andrew Crawford, senior privacy and data attorney at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in an emailed statement.
He continued: “OpenAI’s recent announcement introducing ChatGPT Health means that a number of companies not bound by HIPAA’s privacy protections will collect, share and use people’s health data. And because it’s up to each company to set the rules for how health data is collected, used, shared and stored, inadequate data protections and policies can put sensitive health information at real risk.
OpenAI says the new tab will have a separate chat history and memory feature that can separate your health chat history from the rest of your ChatGPT usage.
Additional protections, such as encryption and multi-factor authentication, will defend your data and keep it secure, the company claims. Health conversations will not be used to train the chatbot, according to the company.
How the tab will work in theory
Privacy concerns aside, another concern is how people intend to use ChatGPT Health. OpenAI’s blog post states that the service “is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.”
The slope here is slippery. In August 2025, a man was hospitalized after the AI chatbot allegedly advised him to replace the salt in his diet with sodium bromide. There are other examples of AI provides incorrect and potentially dangerous advice to individuals, leading to hospitalization.
OpenAI’s announcement also does not address mental health problemsbut an October 2025 blog post says the company is working to strengthen its responses in sensitive conversations. It remains to be seen whether these mental health safeguards will be sufficient to keep people safe.
ChatGPT Health is intended to be used for information about fitness, nutrition and medical care, according to OpenAI. It’s also not intended to replace mental health care, and the chatbot was trained to direct people seeking mental health help to real-world resources, like crisis hotlines.
OpenAI claims that after working with more than 170 mental health experts, it has improved ChatGPT’s ability to respond to mental distress and can de-escalate such conversations. He also says that it is GPT-5 The model hallucinates up to eight times less often than its previous models, according to some benchmark tests.
If you are interested in ChatGPT Health, you can join a waitlist, as the tab is not live yet.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in April against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)
