On January 7, 2026, OpenAI officially entered the personal healthcare area with the launch of ChatGPT Health, a dedicated and secure environment within its flagship app. This new feature is designed to transform the chatbot from a general-purpose assistant into a "personal wellness super-assistant" by allowing users to securely integrate their actual medical records and wellness data. Developed over two years with input from over 260 physicians across 60 countries, ChatGPT Health aims to help users navigate the often fragmented healthcare system, providing a centralized hub for health data that usually lives across various portals, PDFs, and wearable apps.

The core of ChatGPT Health is its ability to "ground" AI conversations in a user's real-world health context. Through a strategic partnership with b.well Connected Health, U.S. users can securely connect their electronic health records (EHRs) from over 2.2 million providers. Additionally, the platform supports seamless integration with popular wellness and lifestyle apps, including Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, Function, Peloton, and Weight Watchers. This allows the AI to provide more personalized insights—such as summarizing recent bloodwork before a doctor’s visit, explaining complex lab results in plain English, or suggesting a workout routine tailored to a user’s actual sleep and activity patterns.

Privacy and security are the structural pillars of this new experience. Recognizing the sensitivity of medical data, OpenAI has built ChatGPT Health as a completely separate, compartmentalized space within the app. Conversations in this section are protected by purpose-built encryption and a dedicated memory system that ensures health-related data does not "leak" into standard chats. Most importantly, OpenAI has confirmed that conversations held within ChatGPT Health are not used to train its foundation models, addressing a primary concern for privacy-conscious users and regulators.

To ensure clinical safety and reliability, OpenAI utilized its HealthBench framework to evaluate the AI’s performance. This safety benchmark consists of 5,000 realistic clinical conversations graded against nearly 50,000 physician-written rubrics. This rigorous testing ensures that while the AI can offer helpful summaries and proactive health tips, it remains within safe boundaries. OpenAI is explicit in its stance that ChatGPT Health is a tool for support and information, not for diagnosis or treatment, and it will actively prompt users to seek professional medical care for urgent or complex symptoms.

The user experience is designed to be proactive rather than just reactive. Features like "Catch Me Up" provide a unified summary of health notifications from different apps, while the AI can help users prepare specific questions for their next physical exam based on their connected data. For those managing specific goals, like GLP-1 weight loss journeys, the integration with Weight Watchers and MyFitnessPal allows ChatGPT Health to suggest specific recipes and meal plans that align with their medical status and activity levels tracked on an Apple Watch.

The launch comes at a time of massive user demand; OpenAI revealed that more than 230 million people already ask health and wellness questions on the platform every week. By formalizing this behavior into a secure "Health" tab, OpenAI is attempting to reduce "portalitis"—the frustration of managing dozens of disconnected patient logins—and provide a more continuous, holistic view of a person’s wellbeing. The platform even offers "Agentic" capabilities, such as using an Instacart connector to automatically turn a suggested meal plan into a grocery order.

As of today, ChatGPT Health is rolling out to a small group of early users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans outside of the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK via a waitlist. Broad access for web and iOS users is expected in the coming weeks. While the most advanced medical record integrations are currently limited to the United States, the launch signals a global shift in how AI can empower individuals to take a more active, data-driven role in their own health journeys.