Improving health intelligence in ChatGPT

Health is one of the most meaningful ways people use ChatGPT. Every week, more than 230 million people turn to ChatGPT for help with health and wellness questions: making sense of health information, understanding lab results, preparing for appointments, navigating insurance, building healthier habits, and figuring out what to ask next.

With GPT‑5.5 Instant, we’re seeing a substantial step forward in health, with improvements in recognizing when urgent care may be needed, asking for relevant context, explaining uncertainty, and making complex information easier to understand. On our most challenging health evaluations, GPT‑5.5 Instant now performs at a level comparable to our frontier Thinking models. Because it is available to all free users in ChatGPT, more people can benefit from these improvements.

That progress reflects both advances in model capabilities and the physician-led work behind our health evaluations. Across our efforts, a global network of physicians helps define what “good” looks like in real-world health situations by reviewing example model responses, describing ideal behavior, and identifying failure modes. Working with physicians gives us a way to measure progress in health and improve how ChatGPT responds over time.

Comparing responses from models on real-world health questions over time shows how ChatGPT has improved in ways that matter for health: recognizing when a situation may need urgent attention, handling uncertainty with better judgment, and giving people clearer, more useful guidance about what to do next.

To date, physicians have reviewed more than 700,000 example model responses that reflect how patients and clinicians use ChatGPT in the real world. Every few minutes, a physician reviews a new response. Their feedback becomes rubrics and evaluation criteria that help researchers measure whether responses are accurate, safe, clear, complete, appropriately cautious, and useful in real-world health situations. This gives us a clearer way to see where models are getting better and where they still need work.

GPT‑5.5 Instant reaches health performance similar to our latest frontier models on an aggregate of health evaluations, including HealthBench Professional, substantially improving from GPT‑5.3 Instant. 5.5 Instant (released May 2026) and 5.3 Instant (released March 2026) are available for all free users in ChatGPT (subject to limits), and we use API pricing to calculate cost for 5.4 Thinking and 5.5 Thinking.

This work also supports OpenAI’s broader work in health, including tools built for healthcare, such as ChatGPT for Clinicians ⁠ and OpenAI for Healthcare ⁠ , which support medical professionals with tasks like documentation, research, and care delivery.

In health, progress means delivering responses that are accurate, understandable, and grounded in good judgment: recognizing when more context is needed, explaining uncertainty without overstating confidence, and helping people understand when to seek care.

To measure that progress, we use health-specific evaluations, including HealthBench ⁠ and HealthBench Professional ⁠ (opens in a new window) . These evaluations use realistic health conversations and physician-written rubrics to assess qualities like accuracy, safety, communication, context awareness, completeness, and appropriate escalation.

As another comparison, we asked physicians to write responses for representative health conversations, with unlimited time and access to the internet (but not AI). A separate panel of physicians then compared these physician responses with model responses over time, reviewing qualities that matter in real interactions, including accuracy, communication, completeness, instruction following, and health decision helpfulness, across 3,500 reviewed responses.