ClinQueryAgent: A Conversational Agent for Population Health Management

TL;DR

ClinQueryAgent is a secure, cloud-enabled conversational system that translates natural language health questions into database queries, aiding healthcare staff in accessing patient data without programming skills.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture combining cloud language models with secure data access and a sub-agent for context management in health informatics.

Findings

System used by 128 staff across 15 practices in NHS.

Enables non-programmers to generate actionable health data.

Public demo available for demonstration purposes.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce ClinQueryAgent, a system for translating natural language population health questions into executable database queries using agents with access to both local and external knowledge bases. Our novel architecture enables the use of powerful cloud-based language models whilst ensuring that no patient data leaves the secure environment. To combat inaccuracies over the course of longer dialogues due to context rot, information retrieval is delegated to a sub-agent. We deploy the system via a chat window embedded within an existing population health management platform where it has been used by 128 staff from 15 healthcare practices covering a total of 148,319 patients in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). We evaluate the system's capacity to autonomously handle a range of health informatics tasks on a constructed dataset and via a beta-testing phase. Our results show that both analysts and clinicians are able to easily generate actionable information from patient health records using natural language requests requiring no programming expertise to verify. We make a public demo of the system available at: https://demo-899965260288.europe-west1.run.app/