On Wednesday, OpenAI introduced a specialized version of its ChatGPT tool aimed at physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists. This move is part of the company’s broader effort to address issues like staffing shortages, administrative burdens, and burnout in the healthcare sector.
The newly released product, dubbed ChatGPT for Clinicians, assists with documentation, medical research, and care consultations—tasks that typically consume significant amounts of clinicians’ time. Currently available only to verified practitioners in the United States, OpenAI plans to expand access internationally.
This launch coincides with a notable increase in AI adoption within the medical field. A 2026 American Medical Association survey cited by OpenAI indicates that 72% of physicians now use AI in their practices, up from 48% just one year prior. The company also notes that clinician usage of its platform has more than doubled over the past year, with millions accessing ChatGPT weekly.
The tool features a clinical search function leveraging millions of peer-reviewed sources, a deep research mode for medical literature reviews, reusable workflow templates for tasks like referral letters and authorization requests, and options to earn continuing medical education credits while exploring clinical questions on the platform. Conversations through this platform will not be used in training OpenAI models, and HIPAA compliance can be supported via a Business Associate Agreement for eligible accounts.
In conjunction with its release, OpenAI also unveiled HealthBench Professional, a new benchmark to assess AI performance on realistic clinical tasks across care consultations, documentation, and medical research. The company reported that GPT-5.4, when used in the ChatGPT for Clinicians environment, achieved a score of 59.0 on this benchmark—surpassing human physicians who scored 43.7 under similar conditions and outperforming competing models from Anthropic, Google, and xAI.
It’s important to note that OpenAI developed both the product and the evaluation benchmark. In creating the tool, OpenAI collaborated with hundreds of physician advisors and analyzed over 700,000 model responses. During pretesting, physicians deemed 99.6 percent of responses safe and accurate across nearly 7,000 conversations.
OpenAI emphasizes that this tool is intended to support rather than replace clinical judgment—a distinction closely monitored by regulators and skeptics as the product gains wider adoption.
The healthcare sector is a rapidly growing market for AI tools. OpenAI’s data shows that clinician usage of ChatGPT has more than doubled over the past year, while McKinsey reports 50% of healthcare leaders say their organizations have implemented generative AI—an increase from 47% in Q4 2024 and 25% in Q4 2023. Additionally, BCG research reveals that 60% of consumers already use AI for personal health management.