OpenAI says new ChatGPT software for doctors outperforms humans at clinical tasks

OpenAI on Wednesday unveiled a free, specialized version of… ChatGPT for doctorsnurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists, deepening the company’s push into a healthcare sector plagued by understaffing, administrative overload and burnout.

The product, called ChatGPT for Clinicians, is designed to handle documentation, medical research and care consultations, time-consuming tasks that eat up the hours doctors could otherwise spend with patients. Access is currently limited to certified practitioners in the United States, with plans to expand internationally.

This announcement comes as the adoption of artificial intelligence in medicine increases. According to a 2026 American Medical Association survey cited by OpenAI, 72% of doctors now use AI in clinical practice, compared to 48% just one year ago. The company says doctors’ use of its platform has doubled over the past year, with millions relying on ChatGPT weekly.

Among the tool’s features are a clinical search function that draws on millions of peer-reviewed sources, a deep search mode for reviewing medical literature, reusable workflow templates for tasks such as referral letters and prior authorization requests, and the ability to earn continuing medical education credits while researching clinical questions in the platform.

Conversations will not be used to train OpenAI models, and HIPAA compliance support is available through a Business Associate Agreement for eligible accounts.

Alongside the launch, OpenAI released HealthBench Professional, a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI performance on real-world clinical tasks across three categories: care consulting, documentation, and medical research.

GPT-5.4, running in the ChatGPT for Clinicians workspace, scored 59.0 on the benchmark — higher than human clinicians, who scored 43.7 even with unlimited time and Internet access, and higher than competing models from Anthropic, Google, and xAI, the company reported.

However, these results come with an important caveat: OpenAI built the product and the benchmark used to evaluate it.

To develop the tool, the company says it worked with hundreds of physician advisors and reviewed more than 700,000 sample responses. In pre-testing, doctors rated 99.6% of responses as safe and accurate across nearly 7,000 conversations.

OpenAI has been careful to frame the tool as a support system rather than a substitute for clinical judgment, a distinction that regulators and skeptics are likely to watch closely as the product rolls out more widely.

Healthcare represents a rapidly expanding market for AI tools. In addition to OpenAI data showing that doctors’ use of ChatGPT has doubled over the past year, McKinsey data It indicates that 50% of healthcare leaders reported that their organizations have implemented productive AI, up from 47% in Q4 2024 and 25% in Q4 2023. Meanwhile, BCG research 60% of consumers show Already use AI for personal health.