OpenAI reveals 600,000 weekly health queries from hospital deserts as seven in ten come after hours

OpenAI's Head of Business Finance Chengpeng Mou shared some numbers on ChatGPT's health usage. US users send about two million messages per week on health insurance topics alone, with roughly 600,000 of those coming from people in "hospital deserts," areas where the nearest hospital is at least a 30-minute drive away. Seven out of ten health queries come in outside regular office hours. All figures are based on anonymized US usage data.

Mou chimed in after Simon Smith posted on X about his family using ChatGPT to navigate his father's illness. They pooled information from different doctors and nurses into a shared ChatGPT project to make better decisions. According to Mou, stories like this aren't "edge cases."

OpenAI has been steadily pushing into healthcare, recently rolling out a dedicated health section inside ChatGPT and working to get its chatbot into more US hospitals.