The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Is ChatGPT Now the World's Largest Health App? | OpenAI VP of Health Nate Gross, MD

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Apr 27, 2026

Dr. Nate Gross, VP of Health at OpenAI and physician-entrepreneur who co-founded Doximity and Rock Health, discusses AI’s massive role in health. He talks about ChatGPT as a 24/7 health front door, efforts to reduce hallucinations and build safety guardrails, clinician-focused tools like ChatGPT for Clinicians, and where startups should concentrate in the new AI health landscape.

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INSIGHT

Winning Means Helping Healthcare Systems Win

Winning in healthcare AI is not zero-sum; success means helping disparate systems (patients, clinicians, scientists, health systems) win.
Nate says companies must solve workflow-specific problems, earn trust per stakeholder, and build models, products, and partnerships that connect to existing care delivery.

INSIGHT

ChatGPT Is Already A Massive Health Front Door

ChatGPT already functions as a major health access point with ~900 million weekly users and ~40 million daily health queries.
Nate Gross frames this scale as a responsibility to build healthcare-specific apps and guardrails because users will consult ChatGPT regardless.

ADVICE

Design Patient AI For Triage And Visit Preparation

Prioritize triage, translation, and preparation for scarce clinician time when building patient-facing AI.
Use AI to explain labs/terms, identify urgency for escalation, and prepare patients to make better use of limited visit time.

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Forty million people use ChatGPT for health-related questions every day, making it one of the most widely used tools for health information in the world. So what is their team doing to maximize impact and minimize harm? For one, they've brought in hundreds of physicians globally to continuously review outputs and shape how the models respond across different scenarios, literacy levels, and edge cases. Second, they've hired my Rock Health co-founder, Nate Gross, MD, as their VP of Health.

In this full-circle episode, I sit down with Nate, who also co-founded Doximity (DOCS) and knows a thing or two about building in digital health. We discuss the astonishing speed of AI progress, how models are trained for safety and accuracy, and what this technological evolution means for every part of the healthcare system.

Key topics:

How ChatGPT is becoming a 24/7 front door for health questions, and whether it is replacing Dr. Google or starting to compete with the healthcare system itself
How OpenAI is trying to reduce hallucinations, avoid sycophantic behavior, and build guardrails for sensitive use cases like mental health
OpenAI’s goals to “raise the floor, sweep the floor, and raise the ceiling” with new product launches like ChatGPT for Clinicians and GPT-Rosalind
How Nate thinks about the AI race and what winning in healthcare actually requires
Where startups should focus their efforts now that specialized products are launching for clinicians and life sciences
The single hardest problem in healthcare that AI, according to Nate, probably won't fix anytime soon

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About our guest:

Dr. Nate Gross is the VP of Health at OpenAI. He previously co-founded Doximity and Rock Health. He graduated from the Emory University School of Medicine with an MD, Harvard Business School with an MBA, and Claremont McKenna College with a BA in Government. He serves as affiliated faculty for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Stanford.

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