A governed retrieval system that answers employee questions from internal docs — with permissions, citations, and an eval harness that catches drift.
A hospital or multi-site health system has the answer somewhere — in a clinical protocol, a payer-policy manual, a coding guideline, an HR policy, an EHR tip sheet — but it is spread across a clinical wiki, a SharePoint nobody trusts, and a dozen department drives, and finding it costs nurses, coders, and revenue-cycle staff time they do not have. A naive chat-with-your-docs tool is dangerous in healthcare: it could surface PHI to someone without a need to know, answer a clinical question from an outdated protocol, or invent a citation. An enterprise-grade internal retrieval system is built for the constraint: it enforces role-based permissions so answers never cross access boundaries, cites every answer back to the governing document and version so staff verify against the source, and runs an eval harness that catches accuracy drift — and it is scoped to operational and policy knowledge, never positioned as clinical decision-making, which stays with licensed clinicians.
A regional health system indexed its administrative and operational knowledge — HR policies, EHR tip sheets, payer-policy and prior-auth requirements, coding guidelines — behind existing role groups, so a coder gets a cited answer on a payer rule and a manager gets HR policy, each only what their role permits. A hospital revenue-cycle team uses cited retrieval to answer prior-authorization and denial questions in seconds instead of paging a supervisor. The compliance office runs a weekly eval set against the index and gates any configuration change on it, treating answer quality as a controlled process given the regulatory environment.
Catalogue every knowledge source, its owner, freshness, and sensitivity. Decide what is in scope — and explicitly exclude what is stale or unowned.
Index documents with their access-control metadata so retrieval filters to what the asking user is already entitled to see. Permissions are a retrieval-time filter, not an afterthought.
Every answer links the exact passages it used. No citation, no answer — the model returns 'not found' rather than guessing.
Curate a golden set of 100-300 real questions with verified answers. Score retrieval recall and answer faithfulness on every change, in CI.
Launch to one team, capture thumbs-down with reasons, fix the underlying docs or retrieval, then expand. Treat bad answers as documentation bugs.
Tuned for Healthcare. Use as-is or adapt to your voice.
Scope the assistant to operational, administrative, and policy knowledge only — never patient-specific PHI and never clinical decision support. Map every source to the roles permitted to read it; filter passages to the requester’s role BEFORE ranking. Exclude any source containing PHI from the index unless access is strictly role-gated and logged. Log every query and the documents surfaced to an auditable sink. Re-sync permissions whenever the source system changes. Audit quarterly that no role can surface content it should not.
Answer staff questions using ONLY the retrieved internal documents. Rules: cite the governing document and version for every statement; quote exact values for any policy threshold, payer rule, or coding guideline. If the documents do not contain the answer, say so and name the owning department — never answer from general knowledge. For anything that crosses into clinical judgment, diagnosis, or treatment, do not answer — respond that this requires a licensed clinician and point to the relevant protocol. Prefer a short cited answer over a long unsourced one.
Score the system on a weekly golden set drawn from real staff questions. Per question, 0–2 on: Correctness (matches the current governing document); Grounding (every claim cited to a real supplied passage; 0 for any fabricated cite); Permission-safety (no cross-role or PHI leakage — a single failure fails the run); Appropriate-deferral (correctly refuses and routes clinical-judgment questions). Block any index/prompt change that lowers Grounding or Deferral, or that produces any Permission-safety failure. Keep the eval set under change control.
{"question":"...","expected_answer":"...","must_cite":["doc-id-1"],"acceptable_to_say_unknown":false,"owner":"team"}For each generated answer: extract every claim, verify each is supported by a cited passage. Faithfulness = supported claims / total claims. Block deploys that drop below 0.95 on the golden set.
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Skip this if your underlying documentation is wrong or contradictory — RAG will faithfully retrieve the wrong answer. It is a retrieval system, not a fact-checker. Fix document ownership and freshness first.
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