If you use ChatGPT and you're in the United States, you may have noticed a new "Health" tab this week. That's not a glitch — OpenAI just made ChatGPT Health available to every US user, on every plan, including the free one.
What's new. Announced Thursday, July 23, 2026, ChatGPT Health lets you connect your Apple Health data — steps, sleep, workouts — straight into your ChatGPT conversations. If your doctor's office uses certain electronic record systems (Epic and Oracle Health are the two OpenAI named), you can link those too, so ChatGPT can see things like recent lab results or visit summaries. Once connected, you get a dedicated Health tab that keeps its own conversation history, separate from your regular chats, where you can track how a symptom, medication, or sleep pattern changes over time and prepare questions before a doctor's appointment. It works on the web and in the ChatGPT app on iPhone — it hasn't rolled out to Android yet.
Why now. OpenAI says people already send it roughly 300 million health-related questions a week, up from about 230 million back in January. Rather than leaving that happening informally in ordinary chats, the company built a dedicated space for it — with, it says, the same underlying model but a setup designed specifically around tracking health information over time rather than answering a one-off question.
The privacy catch. OpenAI says it won't use your health conversations to train its models or to serve you ads, and that it will generally ask before using this data for anything beyond answering you. But here's the part worth sitting with: on the free, Plus, or other individual consumer plans, ChatGPT Health is not covered by HIPAA, the US law that protects the privacy of your medical records at a doctor's office or hospital. Everything OpenAI does with your health data on these plans is a company promise written into its terms of service — not a legal requirement backed by the same enforcement and penalties that apply to your actual healthcare providers. If a promise like that changes down the line, you'd have far less legal recourse than you would with a real medical provider.
What to actually do with this. Connecting your Apple Health and medical records to ChatGPT can be genuinely useful — for spotting patterns in your own data, or walking into a doctor's visit with clearer questions. But treat it the way you'd treat any service that isn't legally bound to protect medical privacy: think about what you're comfortable a private company holding, keep in mind it can see more about you than a single symptom description would, and don't treat anything it tells you as a substitute for what your actual doctor says. Our guide on asking AI about your health symptoms covers where AI chatbots are genuinely useful for health questions and where they fall short, and ChatGPT's privacy settings walks through how to control what the app remembers about you.