ClinicBot: A Guideline-Grounded Clinical Chatbot with Prioritized Evidence RAG and Verifiable Citations

arXiv cs.AI / 5/5/2026

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Key Points

  • ClinicBot is an AI clinical chatbot designed to provide guideline-grounded, accurate, and verifiable answers for high-stakes diagnosis and risk assessment, addressing the hallucination problem common in general LLM use.
  • The system extracts clinical guidelines into structured semantic units (e.g., recommendations, tables, definitions, and narrative) with explicit provenance so that responses can be traced back to official sources.
  • Unlike typical RAG approaches that treat retrieved evidence equally and rely mainly on text similarity, ClinicBot prioritizes evidence by clinical significance and guideline structure to reduce noisy context and improve alignment with clinical practice.
  • ClinicBot includes a web-based interface that delivers concise, actionable responses accompanied by verifiable citations, and its demonstration focuses on diabetes questions plus an ADA Standards of Care–faithful diabetes risk assessment tool.
  • The authors report that the guideline extraction and hierarchical evidence ranking can be executed reliably in a multi-agent setting to scale processing of complex clinical guidelines.
  • This arXiv announcement introduces a research-grade method and prototype for improving trustworthiness in clinical chat systems via evidence structuring, prioritized retrieval, and citation-backed outputs.

Abstract

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.