Claude Alternative for Healthcare: BastionGPT vs Claude Team

A signed BAA on every plan

This is the difference that matters on day one. Anthropic's Privacy Center is explicit that its BAA does not cover the Free, Pro, Max, or Team plans, and that a list of features stays outside the BAA even on HIPAA-ready Enterprise. A clinician who pastes patient details into Claude Team has sent PHI to a vendor with no BAA in place, which HIPAA treats as an impermissible disclosure and a violation by definition, regardless of how carefully the organization otherwise behaves.

BastionGPT enters a signed Business Associate Agreement with every customer on every plan, including the free trial, and supports HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, FERPA, PIPEDA, PHIPA, and Australian APP requirements. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, runs on HITRUST CSF certified and SOC 2 Type II attested Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and is independently penetration tested at least annually. In three years serving more than 10,000 healthcare organizations, BastionGPT has had zero breaches of protected health information.

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HIPAA access without a 20-seat contract

Anthropic does offer a HIPAA path, and it is well documented: a Claude Enterprise plan, where the Primary Owner enables HIPAA-ready configuration in organization settings and accepts the BAA (a decision Anthropic notes cannot be reversed from admin settings). As of August 2026 that path is open on both self-serve Enterprise, which carries a 20-seat minimum, and sales-assisted Enterprise, which carries a 50-seat minimum. Anthropic's help center states the feature is available for Enterprise plans only; Team and individual plans cannot enable HIPAA at all.

Anthropic's billing documentation adds that HIPAA-ready organizations are an exception to its current single-seat Enterprise billing model and are provisioned with separate Chat and Chat + Claude Code seat types. Buying compliant Claude still means buying an Enterprise plan, not a standard checkout.

The math for a five-clinician practice: BastionGPT Professional Plus runs $2,700 per year ($45 x 5 x 12), or $1,200 on the $20 Professional plan. The Claude HIPAA path requires buying at least 20 seats. At Anthropic's published Enterprise seat rate of $20 per user per month billed annually, 20 seats come to $4,800 per year in seat fees before a single token of usage is billed, and every token is then billed at API rates on top. A five-person practice would be paying for 15 seats it cannot fill.

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Predictable pricing

Claude's two organizational plans meter usage in different ways. Team seats carry weekly per-seat limits (a Standard seat offers 1.25x the Pro plan's usage per five-hour session), with prepaid usage credits available once a member hits the cap. Enterprise removes the caps but bills every token of chat, Claude Code, and Cowork usage at API rates on top of the seat fee, so monthly cost moves with how much your team actually types, uploads, and generates. Anthropic's pricing pages also note that prices and plans are subject to change at its discretion.

BastionGPT charges a flat monthly price per user, and normal human use is not metered. Prices have held steady for over two years, and annual billing includes a free month. A practice can budget its AI spend for the year on one line.

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An AI medical scribe is included

No Claude plan includes an ambient medical scribe: there is no session recording, no speaker diarization, and no visit-to-note pipeline. BastionGPT includes an unlimited AI Scribe on every plan. It recognizes up to 10 speakers in a single session, live or from uploaded audio, for sessions up to 240 minutes, and works with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet telehealth visits without a visible bot participant. Speaker diarization separates the transcript by voice, and BastionGPT's AI labels each speaker's name and role automatically (for example, clinician, patient, or parent), so group therapy, family sessions, and care conferences produce notes that attribute statements to the right person.

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Clinical documentation built in

BastionGPT produces SOAP, Detailed SOAP, DAP, BIRP, H&P, and progress notes out of the box, and a Custom Note tab accepts any free-form prompt per recording: narrative formats, parent-friendly summaries, forensic documentation, and other specialty outputs. You can upload example notes so BastionGPT matches your writing style, and a Saved Prompts library with folder organization and team sharing is included on every plan. BastionGPT achieved 99.3% sentence-level accuracy on clinical documentation tasks from a peer-reviewed study by Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital researchers.

Claude is a genuinely capable writer, but it ships with no clinical templates. Every note format, every referral letter structure, and every documentation standard must be built by your team from scratch and maintained in shared Projects.

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The same Claude models, under a healthcare BAA

BastionGPT names its engines: licensed and HIPAA-compliant versions of GPT-5.5, Claude, and Gemini 3 Pro. Every plan selects the best model for each task automatically, and Professional Plus adds manual model selection plus early access to new models as they ship. If Claude's model quality is what drew you to Anthropic's plans, that quality is available inside BastionGPT with a signed BAA at $20 per user per month, with no Enterprise seat minimum to clear. Claude's plans provide Anthropic models only, so cross-checking a hard case against GPT-5.5 or Gemini 3 Pro means leaving the platform.

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Document workflows sized for patient records

On Professional Plus and Ultra plans, BastionGPT reads 10+ documents at once, up to 1,000+ pages of combined context, across PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, HTML, text, and image formats, including OCR for scanned records. A clinician can upload a full patient history, a psychological evaluation, and records from multiple providers, then query and cross-reference all of it in one conversation.

Claude's chat interface accepts up to 20 files per conversation at 30MB per file, and the Team plan works within a 200K-token context window (roughly 500 pages or 150,000 words) that is shared with the entire conversation history. Anthropic's documentation also notes that PDFs over 100 pages lose visual analysis and PDFs over 1,000 pages are processed as text only. These are strong general-purpose limits, and none of it may be used with PHI on the Team plan in the first place.

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Healthcare-appropriate content handling

Anthropic's Usage Policy classifies healthcare uses that provide medical advice, patient care, therapy, or mental health guidance as High-Risk Use Cases requiring qualified-professional review and AI disclosure when output reaches individuals, and it states Anthropic may block or modify outputs that violate its policy, including sexually explicit content. Those guardrails are reasonable for a general-purpose product. In a clinical setting, they can translate into friction: legitimate documentation around trauma, abuse, substance use, anatomy, and sexual health can trip consumer-grade filters.

BastionGPT includes healthcare-appropriate content filtering designed for clinical environments, so clinicians can document the full scope of clinical language, including behavioral health, forensic, and crisis documentation, without false flags.

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Human support on every plan

BastionGPT includes email, chat, phone, and video support with real humans on every plan. On Claude's plans, support runs through the help center and tickets, with dedicated customer success management available on sales-assisted Enterprise contracts.

BastionGPT assists with documentation and analysis. Clinicians review and approve all AI-generated output; it does not replace professional judgment.

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