OpenAI flipped the big switch today. ChatGPT Health, the health hub it introduced back in January, is now generally available to every US user 18 and up, on every tier, free plans included. You can connect patient portals through Epic, Oracle Health, and One Medical, pull in Apple Health and MyFitnessPal data, and ask questions grounded in your own labs and visit notes instead of generic internet answers.

This is one of the biggest consumer AI launches of the year, and I have real mixed feelings about it. Let me walk through what shipped and then tell you what I would actually do.

What went live today

The January version was a limited test. What OpenAI announced rolled out today goes a lot further:

  • Everyone in the US, 18+, on web and iOS, on all plans including Free.
  • Medical record connections through Epic, Oracle Health, and One Medical, plus Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and Function.
  • Health questions grew from about 230 million a week during the January test to around 300 million a week now.
  • Your health data now works across all your ChatGPT conversations, not just inside the Health tab. OpenAI says 70% of health questions were happening outside the hub anyway, so they followed the users.
  • OpenAI built the whole thing with input from more than 260 physicians, and says its GPT-5.6 Luna model scores best on its internal HealthBench eval.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Luna is OpenAI's fast, cheap tier, which tells you they expect an enormous volume of health questions and they are routing them to the model that can eat that volume.

The part I actually like

I spent 7 years doing tech support at Apple, and a huge part of that job was translation. Somebody gets a scary-looking message, they do not know what it means, and what they need is a calm person to read it with them and put it in plain English. That is most of health care from the patient's side too. You get a lab result at 9pm with a number flagged in red and a portal message that says "no action needed," and you sit there wondering which one to believe.

An AI that has your actual chart and can say "here is what this number means, here is what changed since March, here is a reasonable question to ask your doctor" is genuinely useful. Not as a doctor. As a translator. OpenAI keeps the disclaimer that ChatGPT Health is not intended for diagnosis or treatment, which is doing a lot of work in a product answering 300 million health questions a week, but as a reading companion for your own records, I get the appeal completely.

The part that gives me pause

Here is the other side, and you know where I stand on this if you have read my piece on where credentials and personal data should live: connecting your medical records to a cloud AI platform is a custody decision, and most people will click through it in four seconds.

Your health history is the most personal data you have. Once it is connected, it flows into conversations everywhere, which is exactly what makes the feature good and exactly what makes it worth stopping to think about. OpenAI is not a hospital. The rules and the incentives are different, and the timing here is not clean either. This launch lands while OpenAI is being sued by a Florida man who says ChatGPT gave him dangerous medical advice. The company clearly believes the product is ready anyway. Maybe they are right. But the last few years of cloud platforms leaking exactly the data they promised to protect have earned some caution, ya know.

What I would do

If you want to try it, here is my honest playbook. Start with the wellness side, the Apple Health and fitness data, and see if the answers are actually useful for you. Hold off on connecting your full medical records until you have decided you trust the product with them, because that connection is the one you cannot un-ring. Ask it to explain results you already discussed with your doctor and see if the explanations match. And whatever you do, do not let it talk you out of a visit your gut says you need.

The translator is here and it is free. Whether you hand it your whole chart is still your call. Take the extra day to make it.