Users of ChatGPT will soon be able to access new health-centred features following the launch of ‘ChatGPT Health’, a dedicated space within the platform designed to support health and medical conversations.
The announcement was made by OpenAI, ChatGPT's mother company, on Wednesday, January 8, in an effort to ensure users are better informed about their health through the chatbot, whose use continues to grow globally.
Through the new service, users can connect their medical records and wellness apps to the chatbot, ensuring that responses are tailored to their own health information.
According to OpenAI, the new service can also explain test results, prepare for doctor's visits, advise on diet and workouts, and compare insurance plans.
"You can securely connect medical records and wellness apps to ground conversations in your own health information, so responses are more relevant and useful to you," OpenAI said.
"Designed in close collaboration with physicians, ChatGPT Health helps people take a more active role in understanding and managing their health and wellness—while supporting, not replacing, care from clinicians," it added.
The tech company says that more than 230 million people globally use ChatGPT every week to ask health- and wellness-related questions, making it one of the most common ways people use chatbots today and a major factor that motivated the engineering of the new feature, which has been in preparation for the past two years.
According to OpenAI, the service will first be rolled out to a small group of users so that it may assess and improve the user experience before being expanded to other users.
Users will first be required to sign up for the waitlist to request access, and after being granted access, they will access the service through the 'health' option from the sidebar menu in ChatGPT.
From there, users will now have the ability to onboard their medical records and the apps they use to track their health and wellness into Health.
OpenAI has assured that the new feature has reinforced protections for sensitive health information that users may feed it.
"Even before introducing ChatGPT Health, we built foundational protections across ChatGPT to give you meaningful control over your data, including temporary chats, the ability to delete chats from OpenAI’s systems within 30 days, and training our models not to retain personal information from user chats," OpenAI said.
