Dr. Sina Bari, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader at data company iMerit, has seen firsthand how ChatGPT can lead patients astray with faulty medical advice.
“I recently had a patient come in, and when I recommended a medication, they had a dialogue printed out from ChatGPT that said this medication has a 45% chance of pulmonary embolism,” Dr. Bari told TechCrunch.
When Dr. Bari investigated further, he found that the statistic was from a paper about the impact of that medication in a niche subgroup of people with tuberculosis, which didn’t apply to his patient.
And yet, when OpenAI announced its dedicated ChatGPT Health chatbot last week, Dr. Bari felt more excitement than concern.
ChatGPT Health, which will roll out in the coming weeks, allows users to talk to the chatbot about their health in a more private setting, where their messages won’t be used as training data for the underlying AI model.
“I think it’s great,” Dr. Bari said. “It is something that’s already happening, so formalizing it so as to protect patient information and put some safeguards around it […] is going to make it all the more powerful for patients to use.”
Users can get more personalized guidance from ChatGPT Health by uploading their medical records and syncing with apps like Apple Health and MyFitnessPal. For the security-minded, this raises immediate red flags.
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
“All of a sudden there’s medical data transferring from HIPAA-compliant organizations to non-HIPAA-compliant vendors,” Itai Schwartz, co-founder of data loss prevention firm MIND, told TechCrunch. “So I’m curious to see how the regulators would approach this.”
But the way some industry professionals see it, the cat is already out of the bag. Now, instead of Googling cold symptoms, people are talking to AI chatbots — over 230 million people already talk to ChatGPT about their health each week.
... continue reading