The Invisible Highway: Can Claude for Healthcare Fix Healthcare’s Infrastructure Problem?

Last week I wrote about the rise of the "Executive Patient" and how OpenAI’s consumer launch is fundamentally changing patient behavior. We discussed a world where the patient arrives with more data, more agency, and higher expectations than ever before. But there is a glaring problem with that vision. When that empowered patient walks through the doors, they are stepping into a system that is still running on infrastructure built for a different era.

For decades the healthcare industry has struggled to connect the dots. Billions have been spent digitizing records, yet we still live in a world of disconnected data islands. The payer system does not speak to the provider system and clinical data does not flow to the claims department. Our medical claims system runs on J-codes, which were introduced in 1978, long before electronic billing was introduced. Pharmacy claims run on a completely different set of electronic standards that do not connect to the medical coding systems. This lack of continuity is the root cause of the broken experiences that frustrate patients and burn out clinicians.

Enter Claude for Healthcare.

Anthropic quietly released a platform aimed squarely at the critical infrastructure of the healthcare enterprise. They are not trying to change how you talk to your doctor. They are trying to fix the broken highway that connects the entire industry.

The Billion-Dollar Disconnect

The healthcare industry has a massive infrastructure problem. Despite the widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records, clinical teams still spend 13 hours every week completing prior authorizations according to a January 2026 AMA survey. The data exists but it is trapped in static files that require human manual labor to move, read, and interpret.

We have spent years trying to solve this by layering new applications on top of old foundations. But new tools and technology can only go so far when the underlying infrastructure remains siloed. We have built digital filing cabinets when what we really needed were digital bridges. You cannot expect technology to fix the foundational workflow problems that exist in healthcare.

This disconnect has a price tag. The industry currently loses $496 billion annually to billing and insurance-related administrative waste. The result is a system where 93% of physicians report that prior authorization delays lead to negative clinical outcomes. The infrastructure cannot keep up with the volume of care, and it certainly cannot keep up with the new speed of the "Executive Patient."

Claude as the Universal Adaptor

Anthropic’s strategy is distinct because it treats AI as an operational layer rather than just a chatbot. The core value of the new platform lies in its "Connectors." Unlike a general-purpose model, Claude comes with pre-built integrations into the industry's sources of truth including the CMS Coverage Database, ICD-10 coding systems, and the NPI Registry.

This connectivity allows organizations to automate the complex workflows that usually keep clinicians glued to their screens. Elation Health provides a perfect example of this in action. They embedded Claude directly into their primary care EHR to handle chart summarization. Instead of spending ten minutes clicking through tabs to review a patient's history, the physician gets an immediate, cited summary of the patient's story. The result is that clinicians are finding answers 61% faster, which allows them to stop hunting for data and start looking at the patient.

On the operational side, Carta Healthcare is using the platform to tackle the heavy lift of clinical data abstraction. This is typically a manual process where staff scour records to report quality data to registries. By using Claude to automate this extraction, they reduced processing time by 66% while maintaining 99% accuracy. This effectively unblocks the flow of quality data without adding administrative overhead to the staff.

These examples prove that the value of AI isn't just in writing emails. It is in automating the invisible friction of the back office so that clinical teams can return their focus to the human work of care delivery.

Trust as the Ultimate Feature

The final piece of this puzzle is safety. Building a digital highway for healthcare requires more than just connectivity; it requires a foundation of absolute trust. Enterprise healthcare organizations are risk-averse by design. They cannot afford to bet on a "black box" model that might hallucinate a diagnosis or expose patient data.

This is where Anthropic is placing its strategic bet. They have engineered Claude on HIPAA-ready infrastructure with a "Constitutional AI" framework that acts as a permanent safety inspector. Unlike standard models that simply predict the next likely word, Claude is designed to show its work. It provides rigorous audit trails and citations, allowing a claims adjuster or a physician to trace every AI-generated output back to a specific medical guideline or coverage policy.

Mike Reagin, the CTO of Banner Health, validated this approach, noting that they chose Claude specifically for its "reputation for responsible AI" and the belief that safety is "non-negotiable." In an industry where a single error can lead to a lawsuit or a denied life-saving procedure, this ability to verify the "why" behind the answer is the foundation to scalable infrastructure.

The Road Ahead

If OpenAI is the catalyst for patient agency, Claude is the infrastructure that makes that agency actionable. We are moving toward a future where the back office is increasingly self-driving through AI automation, offering a critical inflection point for legacy healthcare companies.

The winners of the next decade will not be the organizations that simply buy the software. They will be the leaders who have the courage to experiment and fundamentally rebuild their workflows from the ground up. Business architecture will be redesigned as the scope of what is possible evolves with AI, and specifically the push for data-driven automation ecosystems like "Claude for Healthcare." The strategic imperative for legacy organizations is to use this infrastructure to strip away the administrative drudgery and redisperse their human staff to where they matter most: the patient experience.

I predict that within 36 months, the labor-intensive tasks that burden operational and clinical teams will be streamlined and automated through data connection highways powered by agentic AI workflows. This will impact every sector of healthcare, from administrative staff working to clear a prior authorization, to clinicians submitting for a surgical procedure. The strategic imperative is to take those recovered hours and rebuild strategies that ensure the patient journey is supported. The true moat of the future is not your proprietary data silo; it is how you connect to the broader ecosystem to remove operational strain that slows down service and erodes trust. Automation builds the highway, but it is the human experience that will keep the Executive Patient from taking the next exit.