ClinicBot: A Guideline-Grounded Clinical Chatbot with Prioritized Evidence RAG and Verifiable Citations
Navapat Nananukul (University of Southern California), Mayank Kejriwal (University of Southern California)
Architectural Patterns & Composition
Summary
A clinical chatbot that grounds answers in official medical guidelines using prioritized evidence retrieval and verifiable citations, addressing LLM hallucination risks in high-stakes diagnostic contexts.
Description
Clinical diagnosis requires answers that are accurate, verifiable, and explicitly grounded in official guidelines. While large language models excel at natural language processing, their tendency to hallucinate undermines their utility in high-stakes medical contexts where precision is essential. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems treat all evidence equally, producing noisy context and generic answers misaligned with clinical practice. We present ClinicBot, an AI system that translates guideline recommendations into trustworthy clinical support through three key advances: (1) structured extraction of clinical guidelines into semantic units (recommendations, tables, definitions, narrative) with explicit provenance, (2) evidence prioritization that ranks content by clinical significance and guideline structure rather than textual similarity, and (3) a web-based interface that presents concise, actionable answers with verifiable evidence. We will demonstrate ClinicBot using diabetes questions from real patients and an additional diabetes risk assessment tool that is faithful to the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Standards of Care in Diabetes (2025). The demonstration will illustrate how semantic knowledge extraction and hierarchical evidence ranking can reliably operate in a multi-agent setting to process complex clinical guidelines at scale.
