Healthcare · AI · 2025
Clinical Q&A grounded in 12,000 internal protocols
A hospital network needed nurses to get answers from their internal protocol library without scrolling through PDFs. We built a HIPAA-compliant search system with citations, audit trails, and a strict 'I don't know' fallback when confidence dropped.
- Industry
- Hospital network
- Duration
- 18 weeks
- Team
- 5 engineers + clinical SME
Headline result
−74%
lookup time
The challenge
What needed to change.
Nurses across the network were losing minutes per shift looking up the right protocol — and minutes turn into hours and missed care. Existing search was a SharePoint folder full of PDFs; LLM tools weren't an option without HIPAA-compliant data handling.
Leadership wanted clinical confidence: every answer had to be cited, every interaction had to be auditable, and the system had to refuse to guess when it didn't know.
Our approach
How we built it.
We deployed in a HIPAA-compliant private VPC, with end-to-end audit logging and PHI redaction at every layer. The retrieval index covers 12,000 protocols, each chunked, embedded, and re-ranked at query time.
Confidence scoring gates every answer. Below threshold, the system returns 'I don't know' and links to the broader protocol library — better than a confident hallucination in a clinical context.
Highlights
- HIPAA-compliant deployment in a private VPC
- Citation-required answers with confidence scoring
- Full audit log of every Q&A interaction
- Continuous eval against a clinical reviewer panel
- Zero PHI incidents across 18 months in production
Outcome
What changed.
1,800 active clinicians using the system daily, 74% reduction in protocol lookup time, and a clinical leadership team that finally trusts an AI tool to live in their workflow. The model has been swapped twice without breaking a single integration.
- Protocol lookup time
- −74%
- Citation accuracy
- 98.1%
- Active clinicians
- 1,800
- PHI incidents
- 0
Booking the next quarter
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