Best for: Healthcare
Best LLM for Healthcare
Ranked for HIPAA-eligible deployments, clinical reasoning, and data-residency options. Compliance pillar dominates.
Updated May 2026. Top 3 this month: R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.
Podium
This month’s top three.
- 1R1 0528DeepSeek
- Input / 1M
- $0.50
- Output / 1M
- $2.15
- Context
- 163,840
- 2Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15Qwen
- Input / 1M
- $0.26
- Output / 1M
- $1.56
- Context
- 1,000,000
- 3DeepSeek V3DeepSeek
- Input / 1M
- $0.32
- Output / 1M
- $0.89
- Context
- 163,840
How we rank
Weights tuned for healthcare.
Healthcare workloads add a compliance layer on top of the usual quality tradeoff. A model that tops the leaderboard but has no BAA-covered deployment is not usable. We rank based on availability of HIPAA-eligible endpoints (via Azure, AWS Bedrock, or a provider-hosted enterprise tier), then clinical-reasoning benchmarks, then price.
Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Pillars and weights:
- HIPAA availability45%
- MedQA25%
- MMLU15%
- price15%
Full ranking
Top ranked models
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | R1 0528 | DeepSeek | $0.50 | $2.15 | 163,840 |
| 2 | Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15 | Qwen | $0.26 | $1.56 | 1,000,000 |
| 3 | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | $0.32 | $0.89 | 163,840 |
| 4 | Qwen3.5 397B A17B | Qwen | $0.39 | $2.34 | 262,144 |
| 5 | Hunyuan A13B Instruct | Tencent | $0.14 | $0.57 | 131,072 |
| 6 | MiniMax M2.1 | MiniMax | $0.29 | $0.95 | 196,608 |
| 7 | Trinity Large Preview | Arcee AI | $0.00 | $0.00 | 131,000 |
| 8 | GPT-4o (2024-11-20) | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128,000 |
| 9 | MiniMax-01 | MiniMax | $0.20 | $1.10 | 1,000,192 |
| 10 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,000,000 |
Field notes
Tips for healthcare
- 01
Confirm the BAA covers your specific deployment (e.g. Azure OpenAI vs. public OpenAI).
- 02
De-identify PHI in prompts whenever possible to reduce exposure.
- 03
Keep a human-in-the-loop for any patient-facing output.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The questions teams ask before picking a model for healthcare.
Get instant answers from our AI agent
HIPAA-eligible, yes — via providers that sign a BAA (Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, some enterprise tiers). As of May 2026 our weighted top 3 HIPAA-ready options are R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.
Only in a BAA-covered deployment. The consumer ChatGPT product is not covered.
Minimize it. Most healthcare deployments add a de-identification step before the LLM call.