WOMEN'S HEALTH TECH REPORT: How to Set Up Claude Properly
A step-by-step guide for women’s health clinicians and patients
Large language models or LLMs — AI tools that read, write, and reason with text — are now being used across medicine, including women's healthcare.
Some are being marketed directly to clinicians and patients with claims that deserve the same scrutiny we apply to any new technology.
Before WHTR evaluates these tools, you need to know how to use the most capable one available right now. Claude, made by Anthropic, is currently the best general-purpose LLM for clinical reading, evidence analysis, and medical writing — and like any clinical tool, it performs in direct proportion to how well you set it up. This guide shows you exactly how.
Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic. It is one of the most capable AI tools available for reading medical literature, analyzing guidelines, drafting documents, and thinking through complex clinical problems.
But like any clinical tool, the results depend heavily on setup. A few minutes of configuration makes an enormous difference. This guide walks you through exactly how to do it -- no technical background needed.
These steps apply whether you are an OB, MFM specialist, midwife, L&D nurse, gynecology nurse practitioner, or a patient trying to understand your own care.
Step 1. Create Your Account
Go to claude.ai and click Sign up. You can register with your email address or sign in with Google.
Once you are in, you will see a text box at the bottom of the screen. That is where you type. Everything else builds from there.
What follows is the part most users never find: the six setup steps that separate a generic chatbot from a tool that knows your specialty, reads your guidelines, challenges weak evidence, and drafts documents at a level that would take you an hour to produce yourself — and for clinicians and patients navigating women’s healthcare, that is not a convenience, it is a competitive and clinical advantage worth far more than the cost of membership.
Step 2. Choose the Right Plan
Claude offers a free plan and a paid plan called Claude Pro, which costs $20 per month. Here is what matters for clinical and patient use:
Free plan: Good for trying it out. You can ask questions and have short conversations. However, you cannot reliably upload PDFs, and longer conversations get cut off. Not ideal for clinical work.
Claude Pro ($20/month): This is the plan WHTR readers should use. You get priority access, much longer conversations, and the ability to upload full PDF documents -- journal articles, clinical guidelines, patient information sheets, discharge summaries. If you plan to read research or draft clinical content, Pro is worth every dollar.
For clinicians: Uploading a full ACOG Practice Bulletin, SMFM Consult, or NICE guideline and asking Claude to compare it against another guideline is only possible on Pro. Free will not handle documents of that size.
For patients: If you want to upload the consent form your doctor gave you and ask Claude to explain what it means in plain language, you need Pro. Free can handle short questions but not document review.
The next six steps — Customize, Settings, Projects, Memory, document upload, and knowing Claude's limits — are where I explain (for $ 0.16/day) how an AI tool becomes a clinical-grade assistant that saves you hours every week, which means this guide alone is worth more than your annual WHTR subscription.
The Women's Health Tech Report: Safety analysis, the evidence critique, and the verdict are below -- for subscribers who want the full picture.
