AI in Home Healthcare: Trends & the Future with ChatGPT & Claude

While I have concerns about the use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – namely, the environmental pressures, potential for dangerous hallucinations and the use of data from unreliable sources – I’m far from an AI naysayer. The more time I spend on a health care beat, the more convinced I am that AI is the only way forward for worker-strapped industries like home-based care.

In my personal life, I try to limit my use of these chatbots, but I make an exception when I am concerned about a loved one’s health care situation. I can Google the names of medications and conditions to get a list of side effects and intended uses, but the search results tend to offer only limited information about one aspect of a person’s health. Enter ChatGPT, which asks me relevant questions and offers a more holistic, personalized take on, say, what a diagnosis means. Thankfully, it typically tells me I’m being overly anxious.

I’m not the only one using ChatGPT to assess health care information. About one in six adults reports using AI chatbots at least monthly for health information and advice – and that figure increases to one in four for folks under 30. That’s according to a KFF poll, which also found that about one in five adults say AI is doing more harm than good for folks using it to seek out accurate health information.

This divide between those who regularly use AI for health information and those who think it may be more harmful is set to grow even starker after recent news that both ChatGPT and Claude are investing specifically in the health care space.

The companies behind both AI platforms announced health-specific platforms and tools in recent days. These tools may seem isolated from the home-based care continuum currently – but that will quickly change as they become more sophisticated and likely garner more users’ trust.

In this week’s HHCN+ Update, I’ll share analysis and key takeaways about the AI health takeover, including:

– How these tools are transforming health care

– The potential benefits of these tools in home-based care

– The dangers that could lie ahead for the home-based care industry

The new realm of health care AI

On Jan. 7, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health, saying that the health care-specific tool is designed to support, not replace, medical care, and provide a way for users to get a more holistic view of their health. There is currently a waitlist for the tool.

“Health is already one of the most common ways people use ChatGPT, with hundreds of millions of people asking health and wellness questions each week,” the company’s announcement read. “ChatGPT Health builds on the strong privacy, security and data controls across ChatGPT with additional, layered protections designed specifically for health – including purpose-built encryption and isolation to keep health conversations protected and compartmentalized. 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.”

Anthropic released a health care-specific service soon after. Its innovation is designed more on the clinical enterprise side, with a prior authorization review function, coverage policies, coding systems and clinical guidelines.

“Claude helps healthcare organizations move faster without sacrificing accuracy, safety, or compliance,” the company’s website reads. “Less administrative work, more time with the people you serve.”

These two tools have slightly different implications for home-based care, with ChatGPT’s being more user-focused and Claude’s implicating providers’ workflows themselves, necessitating reviews of compliance policies and training protocols. I’ll review the benefits and potential pitfalls of this new era of AI in health care below.

Reason for AI optimism

In the home-based care industry, the key trend I hear from all players is that health care is evolving into the home. Older adults don’t want to leave their homes, and payers don’t want to spend more on higher-cost options like skilled nursing facilities.

From a macro view, these health-focused AI tools facilitate that trend. People don’t have to leave their homes to get a snapshot of their health – or even turn on their laptop camera to video call with a clinician. These tools support the movement of health care into the home and may even prompt people to increasingly desire more in-home health care services, thereby propping up demand for in-home care.

Additionally, as noted in the KFF poll I mentioned earlier, people are already using chatbots to ask for health advice. The rise of AI in our lives shows no signs of slowing down, so it’s a net positive in my book that ChatGPT invests in better tools to give people safer, more accurate information.

ChatGPT’s health offering also enables users to connect various health data sources to the platform, from their electronic medical records (EMRs) to Apple Health data. This is a crucial element of the tool, because it will increasingly familiarize people with the use of the integrated nature of their health care data and what are, effectively, remote patient monitoring tools.

As home-based care providers increasingly turn to efficiency-enhancing tools, patients will have to get used to their information being part of a larger technological ecosystem – if they are already doing so when using ChatGPT Health, they’re less likely to be surprised when their home-based care provider takes a similar tack. Adding Apple Watch data will also render folks more comfortable with the types of wearable technology that are set to transform the home-based care industry through remote patient monitoring, increasing the data providers have about their patients and reducing negative health outcomes like falls.

The EMR integration aspect also reminds me of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ “Kill the Clipboard” initiative. As part of the initiative, major health care players like CVS Health and UnitedHealth Group have pledged to prioritize easy access to electronic health information to reduce the routine of filling out personal information on paper forms. ChatGPT’s EMR integration and Kill the Clipboard are both waves in the incoming tide of tech-enabled health care.

As technology is regularly cited as the top opportunity for providers in both the home health and home care industries, the general public’s increasing familiarity with some of these tech aspects is likely to reduce friction as the industry transforms into its tech-first future.

The pitfalls for home-based care

I won’t name names, but I certainly have had discussions with family members in which I have to tell them not to totally trust what AI tells them about their health. I’m having flashbacks to telling these family members not to trust everything they read on Facebook. “It’s information,” I say, “but before making a significant change or decision, ask your doctor.” Sometimes, these individuals ignore my advice, but other times they go to their doctor, share what ChatGPT told them, and ask for their doctor’s thoughts.

This trend of patients reaching out to their medical professionals with ChatGPT’s input is going to become the new normal. It’s set to be the next (better-informed) evolution of the WebMD trap – you Google your symptoms, and WebMD tells you your sinus infection is actually cancer. I know I’ve gone to my doctor, unnecessarily concerned about some drastic, life-altering condition that WebMD convinced me I had.

Home-based care providers are going to have to prepare their workers to deal with these hyper-specific, AI-generated recommendations – and the people who are convinced that ChatGPT is more correct than their licensed home care or home health worker. This will require new training protocols and may drain energy from home-based care workers who already are stretched thinly.

In-home care providers also have to consider the flip side of these chatbots: their workers’ use of the tools. Some providers have already taken steps to craft AI compliance policies, including policies that avoid using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

Beau Sorensen, chief operating officer of First Choice Home Health & Hospice, told HHCN the company avoids using LLMs when handling sensitive patient information and vets any AI tools that touch the company’s patients.

“It has to go through a vetting process where it is tested against existing solutions to determine if the AI is high enough quality, if it’s giving excellent results, and if it is ultimately something that will end up serving our patient population, and serving our clinicians better than the existing solution,” Sorensen said.

Whether advising workers on if (or when) to use AI or training them on dealing with AI-informed clients and patients, this new generation of AI tools requires careful thought from providers – but it also is a notable stride forward in health care’s evolution to a smarter, tech-first era.

To that end, the rise of ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare surely have started a domino effect, as other health tech companies now must respond to these new offerings. Just as media and journalism organizations have, by turns, fought against and aligned with the AI companies disrupting their sectors, health care providers and their tech partners now face increasingly complicated questions around an array of issues, including how to safeguard patient privacy, how to leverage AI to safely inform clinical decisionmaking, and who owns and controls the use of health data. At-home care providers might not yet feel the brunt of AI-fueled disruption, but that could soon change; the beginning of 2026 may well go down as the watershed moment when AI took hold in health care and began to accelerate profound transformations.