The appeal is obvious. You have a hospital letter or blood test results written for a doctor, not for you. You would like to ask a plain question - what does this mean, is it different from last year, should I ask my GP about it - and get a plain answer.
In 2026 that became a real product category rather than a demo. It is also moving fast enough that much of what you read about it is already out of date, and the best-known options do not connect to records in New Zealand. Everything below was checked in November 2026, and it says what is available here and what is not.
Disclosure
I am a doctor, and I founded exora, which competes in this category. So I am describing a field I have a stake in, and you should read it accordingly.
What I have tried to do about that: link the source for each product, be specific about what mine does not do, and treat seriously the option most people actually use - pasting documents into an ordinary chatbot - because it works.
The short answer
- ChatGPT Health is real and widely available in the United States. Its medical record connections are US only.
- Perplexity Health and Microsoft’s Copilot Health both launched in the US first, and neither has announced a New Zealand date.
- No consumer AI assistant connects to My Health Record or to GP patient portals here, as far as I could find.
- Pasting your documents into ordinary ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini works from New Zealand today. It is genuinely useful for understanding jargon. Read the three caveats below before you do it with your whole history.
- Apps on the New Zealand stores with record-chat built in include Tidy Health on Apple devices, and exora on iOS, Android and web.
- The one thing worth judging any of them on: can you check the answer against the document it came from, in one step? If not, you are trusting fluency.
ChatGPT Health
OpenAI announced Health in ChatGPT in January 2026 and widened it to users in the United States in late July. It lets you connect Apple Health and supported medical records, so ChatGPT can draw on your medications, lab results and visit notes inside a conversation - explaining a result, summarising what has changed, or helping you prepare for an appointment. It is offered to logged-in adults in the US on the Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans (Digital Health News, checked November 2026).
OpenAI’s stated position is that connected records and the conversations that use them are not used to train its foundation models or to target adverts, and that the feature is meant to “support, not replace” professional medical care.
Availability in New Zealand: the record connections are not. At launch, OpenAI said “medical record integrations, along with some apps, are US only” (The Register, checked November 2026), and the July expansion was described as being for eligible users in the United States. I could find no announcement of a New Zealand rollout since.
Perplexity Health and Copilot Health
Perplexity Health launched in March 2026. It brings together medical records, lab results and wearable data, and answers health questions against your own history. Perplexity says health data is not used to train its models and is not sold. Its announcement says it rolls out “to Pro/Max users in the US” first, with other regions “coming soon” and no dates (Perplexity, checked November 2026).
Copilot Health was announced by Microsoft in March 2026, initially for adults in the United States, with records from US hospitals and providers. Microsoft says its data is kept separate from the rest of Copilot and not used to train its models, and that other territories will be announced later (Engadget, checked November 2026).
Why “US only” is not just a queue
It is tempting to read those notes as a rollout order. But the hard part of these products is not the conversation. It is the connection to your records, which runs on each country’s own health systems and law, and the US products plug into American ones.
Here, your records sit in different places. Health New Zealand’s My Health Record shows immunisations, COVID-19 results and NHI details, not your GP or hospital notes. Your GP record is in whichever patient portal your practice uses (I compared these here). None of the US assistants connects to any of them.
Apple hit the same wall. Its Health Records feature, which downloads clinical records from a provider into the Health app, is listed by Apple as available in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States only (Apple, checked November 2026). It is not available in New Zealand.
What the Privacy Commissioner and Health New Zealand say
There is no New Zealand law written specifically for AI and health records. The existing rules apply. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s guidance, Artificial intelligence and the Information Privacy Principles, says the Privacy Act 2020 “applies whenever you collect, use, or share personal information”, including where overseas organisations provide AI tools for use in New Zealand. Its expectations for generative AI tell organisations not to put personal or confidential information into a generative AI tool unless the provider has confirmed it is not retained or disclosed, and to have a person review the output before acting on it.
Health New Zealand takes the same line with its own staff. Its guidance on generative AI (last updated May 2026) says employees and contractors must not enter personal, confidential or sensitive patient information into unapproved large language models, because the provider “may continue to use the data for training”, and because doing so may not be consistent with the Privacy Act and the Health Information Privacy Code.
That guidance is written for organisations, not for you. Your own records are yours to share, and most of the Privacy Act’s principles do not apply to an individual collecting or holding information solely for their personal or domestic affairs (section 27). But the reasoning is worth borrowing.
What about overseas storage?
Information privacy principle 12 of the Privacy Act 2020 stops a New Zealand agency disclosing personal information overseas unless certain conditions are met, such as the recipient being subject to comparable privacy safeguards. The Health Information Privacy Code has a matching rule 12 for health information. Two things are worth knowing:
- It governs organisations disclosing your information, not your choice to upload it. When you paste a letter into a chatbot, you are the one sending it.
- Overseas companies can still be bound by New Zealand law. Section 4 of the Act applies it to an overseas agency acting in the course of carrying on business in New Zealand, and says that can be the case without a place of business here or any payment.
The practical point: most AI assistants are run from overseas, so your records will be processed outside New Zealand. Know which company is responsible for your data, and read its privacy policy, rather than assuming.
What you can actually do in New Zealand today
Option 1: paste documents into an ordinary AI assistant
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all accept an uploaded PDF or a photo, and all do a genuinely good job of explaining a discharge summary in plain English. For “translate this paragraph of clinical shorthand”, it is hard to beat.
Three caveats, in order of how much they matter.
It has no memory of your history. Each conversation starts from nothing but what you paste in. That is fine for one document and no help with the questions that matter over time - is this going up, when did this first appear, have I been on this medicine before, is this result different from the same test two years ago at another lab. Answering those needs a record, not a chat.
You cannot easily check the answer. More on this below, because it is the central issue.
The training setting may not be what you would choose. These assistants have a setting that decides whether your conversations are used to improve their models. In ChatGPT it is “Improve the model for everyone”, under Settings, then Data controls (OpenAI Help Center, checked November 2026). For Claude’s consumer plans it is in Privacy Settings, and Anthropic says turning it off applies to future chats, not to training already under way (Anthropic, checked November 2026). Find the setting and decide deliberately; these terms change.
Option 2: apps on the New Zealand stores with it built in
Tidy Health is on the New Zealand App Store, for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It is a personal health record whose listing says you can “Ask Tidy AI anything medical” and get answers based on your own record, and that data is saved on your own devices rather than with a third-party cloud service (checked November 2026). The on-device approach is a real privacy advantage. Being Apple-only is a real limitation if anyone in your household uses Android.
exora is mine, covered below.
I compared these and the rest of the field, including the GP portals and My Health Record, in a wider comparison of health record apps in New Zealand.
The thing actually worth judging these on
Every product in this article will give you a confident, fluent, well-organised answer. That is what these models are good at. The problem is that a fluent wrong answer and a fluent right answer look exactly the same, and in a health context you are the person least equipped to tell them apart.
An illustration from medical publishing: fabricated references in biomedical papers - citations to work that does not exist - have risen sharply as AI writing tools have spread, from roughly one paper in 2,828 in 2023 to one in 277 in the first seven weeks of 2026, according to an audit published as a letter in The Lancet and reported by Retraction Watch in May 2026. The instructive detail is not the rate. It is that the fake references made it into published, indexed papers. Nothing about them said “check me”.
That measures nothing about clinical accuracy. But the failure mode is the one that matters: a misread date, a result attached to the wrong test, a medicine stopped years ago described as current. None of these looks wrong on the screen.
Which leads to the only test I would apply. Can you get from the answer to the source in one step? Not “does it cite medical guidance” - useful, but that tells you the general claim is sound, not that it read your document correctly. The question is whether it will show you the actual page and the actual line in your actual hospital letter, so you can see for yourself what it based the answer on.
If it cannot, treat everything it says as a prompt to go and look rather than as a finding. And ask two more things of any product: where your data goes, under whose law, and whether it is used to train models.
Where exora fits
exora is a personal health record app, available on iOS, Android and web. You upload documents, such as PDFs, photos or scans, and exora reads them for you, with a reading system built for medical records. It pulls out the clinical details into one record, and you can then ask questions of your own history in plain language. Results from different labs land on one trend line. exora is free to start, with an optional membership.
The part I would judge us on is checking. Every fact in your record links back to the exact page and text of the document it came from, and answers in the chat cite the document they drew on. Your health data is never used to train AI models. How we handle data is on our security page.
Where it does not help, plainly:
- The language models are not ours. The reading system is ours; the language models underneath it come from established providers, as with every product in this article.
- It can misread. That is why every fact links back to the exact page and text it came from, and chat answers cite the document they drew on. Check anything that matters against the original.
- No connection to Health New Zealand. exora has no link to My Health Record, My Health Account, your GP’s portal or any Health New Zealand system. You download documents, or request your records, and upload them yourself.
- Your data is stored in Sydney, Australia. That is outside New Zealand. exora has no New Zealand health-data certification. Read the security page before you upload anything.
- It cannot read documents you do not have. You have a legal right to a copy of your health information from any provider, usually free, and our New Zealand records guide explains how to ask.
- It is not medical advice. It organises your information and helps you understand it. It does not diagnose or tell you what to do, and it is not a substitute for talking to a clinician.
A sensible way to use any of this
Use it to prepare, not to decide. These tools are good at turning clinical shorthand into English and at helping you arrive at a GP appointment with a clear question instead of a vague worry.
What none of them should be is the last word. If an answer suggests something has changed, or something looks wrong, the next step is a clinician - ideally one you can show the actual document to.
Sources
- Digital Health News: OpenAI rolls out Health in ChatGPT for US users (US rollout, plans, privacy statements)
- The Register: ChatGPT Health wants access to sensitive medical records (medical record integrations US only)
- Perplexity: introducing Perplexity Health (US Pro/Max rollout, privacy statements)
- Engadget: Microsoft’s Copilot Health (US preview, privacy statements)
- Apple: iOS feature availability (Health Records not available in New Zealand)
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner: AI and the Information Privacy Principles and generative AI expectations
- Health New Zealand: using generative AI and large language models
- Privacy Act 2020, section 4 (overseas agencies), section 27 (personal or domestic affairs) and IPP 12 (disclosure outside New Zealand), and the Health Information Privacy Code 2020, rule 12
- Retraction Watch: one in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references
- OpenAI Help Center: data controls and Anthropic: updates to consumer terms (training settings)
Product availability, features and privacy statements were checked in November 2026 and are sourced inline. This category is changing very quickly, so treat the dates as load-bearing and check anything important against the provider’s own current documentation. This article is general information about software and how these systems work, not medical or legal advice. It does not describe or recommend any treatment. Talk to a qualified health professional about your health.
