The appeal is obvious. You have a clinic letter or a set of blood results written for a doctor, not for you, full of abbreviations and reference ranges. You would like to ask a plain question - what does this actually mean, is it different from last year, should I be asking 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 It is also moving fast enough that much of what you read about it is already out of date, and the best-known options do not connect to records in Ireland. 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: say what each product does and where it is available, link the source, and be specific about what mine does not do. I have also included the option most people actually use - pasting documents into an ordinary chatbot - and treated it seriously, because it works and because dismissing it would be self-serving.
The short answer
- ChatGPT Health is real and widely available in the United States. It has not launched in Ireland or anywhere in the European Economic Area, and connecting medical records is a US-only feature.
- Perplexity Health and Microsoft’s Copilot Health both launched in the US first, and neither has announced a date for Ireland.
- The HSE Health App shows some of your information, but has no assistant you can ask about your record.
- Pasting your documents into ordinary ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini works from Ireland today. It is genuinely useful for understanding jargon. Read the three caveats below before you do it with your whole history.
- Apps on the Irish 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. In the US it connects to records held in the Epic and Oracle Health systems (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, that connected health data gets extra protection on top of standard encryption, and that the feature is meant to “support, not replace” professional medical care.
Availability in Ireland: none yet. At launch, users in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom were not eligible, and medical record integrations were US only (The Register; Silicon Republic, checked November 2026). Ireland is in the EEA, so that exclusion covers you. I could find no announcement from OpenAI of an EEA launch since.
Perplexity Health and Copilot Health
Perplexity Health was announced 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 encrypted in transit and at rest, is not used to train its models and is not sold to third parties. Its own 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, in English, with a waitlist. Its records come from US hospitals and providers. Microsoft says Copilot Health data is kept separate from the rest of Copilot and is 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 healthcare systems and law.
The US products plug into American record systems. Ireland has no national patient record for anything to plug into yet: your GP keeps your GP record on the practice’s own system, and each hospital keeps its own. The Health Information Act 2026 allows the HSE to create a national electronic health record for every patient, but it comes into force in stages, and I could not confirm that any patient has one yet.
The usual phone route is closed too. Apple’s Health Records feature, which downloads clinical records from a provider into the Health app, is listed by Apple for Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States only (checked November 2026). It is not available in Ireland.
And EU law treats health data with particular care. Under the GDPR, “data concerning health” is one of the special categories of personal data, which may only be processed under specific conditions (Articles 4(15) and 9). The EU’s AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, came into force in August 2024 and applies in stages. It can class AI that is, or is a safety part of, a regulated medical device as high-risk (Article 6 and Annex I). Whether a given health chatbot falls into that class is not something I can settle here.
What about the HSE Health App?
The HSE Health App shows your vaccination records, health cards, refunded medicines, waiting lists and, on the latest version, hospital discharge summaries. The HSE does not list GP notes or test results among its features, and neither its list of current features nor its list of planned ones includes an assistant you can ask about your record. I wrote a separate comparison of what it shows and leaves out.
What you can actually do in Ireland 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.
You are handing special category data to a company, and the defaults may not be what you would choose. The GDPR protection above is real, but it governs the company, not your decision to upload. Ireland’s regulator, the Data Protection Commission, notes that with AI systems such as large language models there may be issues “arising from the accuracy or retention of personal data used (or generated)”, and a tendency to use personal data in training “sometimes unnecessarily and without your knowledge” (DPC: AI, large language models and data protection). The main general assistants are run by US companies, so read the provider’s privacy policy to see which company is responsible for your data and where it is processed.
Separately, 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 Free, Pro and Max plans it is in Privacy Settings; Anthropic says that if you allow training your data is kept for up to five years, and if you do not, for 30 days, and that turning it off applies to future chats, not to training that has already started (Anthropic, checked November 2026). Find the setting and decide deliberately. These terms change, so check the current version, not this snapshot.
Option 2: apps on the Irish stores with it built in
Tidy Health is on the Irish 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 “all data is saved on your own trusted devices and not stored 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, and nothing in it is built around Irish health services.
exora is mine, covered below.
I compared these and the rest of the field, including the HSE Health App, in a wider comparison of health record apps in Ireland.
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. A misread date or a medicine stopped years ago described as current does not look wrong on the screen.
There is a useful illustration of the shape of this problem 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 weeks of 2026, according to an analysis 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 papers. Nothing about them signalled “check me”.
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 clinic letter, so you can see for yourself what it based the answer on.
If it can, you can check anything that matters, and the AI becomes a way of finding your way around your own records. If it cannot, treat everything it says as a prompt to go and look rather than as a finding.
Three questions to ask any of them
- Where does my data go, and under whose law? Processing outside the EU is not automatically bad, but you should know rather than assume.
- Is it used to train models? The record-connected products in this article all say no for connected health data. Check that the answer covers what you are actually uploading, and check the setting yourself.
- Can I check an answer against my own document? The one above. If a product cannot do this, it is a chatbot with your records in it, not a record you can question.
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 get things wrong. 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 HSE connection. exora has no link to the HSE Health App, MyGovID, your GP’s system or any HSE service. You request your records and upload them yourself.
- Your data is stored in Sydney, Australia. That is outside the EU. exora has no HSE approval or Irish 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 records from any provider, public or private, and our Ireland 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 genuinely 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.
None of them should be the last word. If an answer suggests something has changed or looks wrong, the next step is a clinician, ideally one you can show the document to.
Sources
- Digital Health News: OpenAI rolls out Health in ChatGPT for US users (US rollout, record connections, privacy statements)
- The Register: ChatGPT Health wants access to sensitive medical records and Silicon Republic (EEA, Switzerland and UK excluded; 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 countries)
- HSE: the HSE Health App (current and planned features)
- Health Information Act 2026 (national electronic health record, commencement by order)
- GDPR, Articles 4 and 9 (health data as special category data) and EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Article 6 and Annex I)
- Data Protection Commission: AI, large language models and data protection
- OpenAI Help Center: data controls and Anthropic: updates to consumer terms (training settings)
- Retraction Watch: one in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references
- Tidy Health on the Irish App Store
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.
