OpenAI acquires Torch Health to boost its healthcare offerings

OpenAI has acquired San Francisco-based startup Torch Health in a move that analysts say is a strategic maneuver to boost its ChatGPT health initiative launched last week.

In a blog post last week, OpenAI detailed its vision of ChatGPT Health: to create a chatbot that allows users to connect their medical records and wellness apps, such as Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal, and help them understand their recent test results, prepare for doctor appointments, and get advice on how to approach diets or understand tradeoffs of different insurance options based on their individual healthcare patterns.

Torch Health, too, according to its founders, was building an application that could help an individual make more sense of their medical records via AI by pulling data from doctor visits, lab reports, wearables, consumer wellness tests, and fragmented healthcare portals.

“We started Torch to build a medical memory for AI, unifying scattered records into a context engine that helps you see the full picture, connect the dots, and make sure nothing important gets lost in the noise again,” the company’s four-member team wrote in a note.

Torch Health’s technology will “accelerate the development of ChatGPT Health,” helping the LLM and chatbot provider refine domain-specific services around healthcare, said Akshat Tyagi, associate practice leader at HFS Research. The acquisition, according to Tyagi, will help OpenAI address data fragmentation challenges in healthcare, which is the most critical problem that needs solving, as it will become the base for any application to provide more authentic and accurate responses to queries, as healthcare is a risk-sensitive and regulated sector.

Anthropic, too, is betting on healthcare

OpenAI is not the only AI software and services provider that is making its foray into healthcare. Claude-provider and OpenAI rival Anthropic is making efforts in the same direction.

In a blog post published over the weekend, Anthropic announced that it was expanding its Claude for Life Sciences offering by adding Claude for Healthcare and adding new capabilities to Claude for Life Sciences.

Claude for Healthcare, the company wrote, is a complementary set of tools and resources that allow healthcare providers, payers, and consumers to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products.

Just a couple of days back, OpenAI, too, had launched a similar product under the name — OpenAI for Healthcare — that too contains similar tools targeted at different stakeholders in the healthcare industry.

Analysts say OpenAI and Anthropic’s foray into healthcare is a sign that LLM technology has matured enough to support healthcare use cases. They also see this as a battle to become the foundational intelligence layer for healthcare systems.

“Earlier models weren’t reliable enough. Today’s models can summarize clinical notes, support patient communication, assist with documentation, and surface relevant medical literature in ways that actually reduce cognitive or manual load for clinicians,” HFS Research’s Tyagi said.

The healthcare system, too, according to Tyagi, is looking for efficiency gains that don’t compromise care in the wake of rising costs and burnout.

In such a scenario, whoever becomes embedded early in these workflows gains a long-term strategic position, Tyagi pointed out, adding that once an AI system is trusted inside clinical or administrative processes, it will become very hard to displace.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have said that they don’t want to replace clinicians or provide treatment, but assist them. OpenAI said it would not use users’ health data to train models.Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol aims to simplify life for shopping bots – ComputerworldRead More