Purpose/Significance In order to quickly adapt to the development of new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and accurately grasp the development direction of medical AI, it is urgent to systematically analyze and sort out the potential and typical applications and challenges of generative large language models in the medical field.Method/Process The paper investigates and analyzes the literature and public reports, systematically summarizes the attempts and evaluation results of generative large language models in different tasks in the medical field.Result/Conclusion The application of generative large language models in the medical field is gradually increasing, covering almost all medical informatics tasks from medical information extraction, text classification, information retrieval, question and answer and dialogue to physician examination, medical record generation, medical result prediction, drug development and medical image analysis, etc., which can provide intelligent assistance for medical services, medical research and education. At the same time, the application of generative large language models in the medical field also faces many challenges, such as the hallucination problem, data privacy protection, ethics, controllability of results and interpretability of algorithms.