Healthcare

PHI-safe RAG: an architecture that survives audit

Retrieval augmented generation is easy to stand up and hard to defend in a compliance review. The difference is where you enforce the boundary.

6 min read

Enforce scope at retrieval, not at the prompt

Prompt-level instructions are guidance, not controls. Every retrieval call should carry the requesting user's identity and be filtered by the same access rules the source system enforces.

Keep an immutable trail

Auditors ask a simple question: who saw what, when, and why. Log the retrieved document IDs alongside the generated answer so any output can be traced back to its sources.

  • Per-request identity propagation
  • Document-level ACL filtering before embedding search
  • Immutable answer-to-source linkage

De-identify on the way in where you can

Not every index needs identifiers. Splitting a de-identified corpus for general search from a restricted corpus for care-specific lookups shrinks the audit surface dramatically.

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