Healthcare Appointment Retrieval Architecture for Fresh, Traceable Appointment Answers

Description and use

The retrieval architecture for a healthcare appointment assistant delivers fresh, traceable answers by applying hard gating, staged search, and explicit ranking signals.

Problem

A healthcare appointment assistant must provide answers that are current, relevant, and traceable to authoritative sources, avoiding stale or irrelevant policy text.

Outcome

The architecture guarantees that appointment answers are based on up‑to‑date, tenant‑specific policies, with evidence traceable to source documents, improving safety and auditability.

Workflow

• 1. Filter candidates by tenant, locale, appointment type, and effective date.
• 2. Merge results from a narrow web search and an indexed vector collection.
• 3. Rank merged candidates by validity, scope, freshness, semantic similarity, and evidence quality.
• 4. Pass only bounded, cited context to the answer model.
• 5. Include source URL or document ID and retrieval timestamp in the prompt.
• 6. If no traceable source is found, ask for clarification or hand off.

Evidence

Start with hard gates. Filter by tenant, locale, appointment type, and effective date before applying semantic similarity.

Source

After the gates, combine signals in an order that an evaluator can inspect: 1. Validity 2. Scope 3. Freshness 4. Semantic score 5. Evidence quality.

Source

The final prompt should include the source URL or document identifier beside each chunk, plus the retrieval timestamp.

Source