A medical assistant is only useful if you can check it

Hippocrates answers medical questions for clinicians. Ask for the first-line treatment for hypertension, or when metformin is contraindicated, and it replies in plain language.

In medicine, a fluent answer is not enough. A clinician has to be able to check it, quickly, before acting on it. That one requirement shaped every part of the product.

Every answer shows its sources

Answers come from a curated knowledge base, not from the open web, and each one cites the sources it used. If there is nothing trustworthy to cite, the assistant says so instead of filling the gap.

If it can’t point to a source, it shouldn’t sound sure.

More than a chat box

Clinicians don’t work in single questions. Hippocrates keeps patient cases, saved artifacts and an institution’s own knowledge base alongside the chat, inside a workspace for each institution.

• Chat with citations, with suggested questions to start from
• Patient cases that keep context across conversations
• Artifacts: answers and summaries saved for later
• A knowledge base each institution can curate

Access rules that hold up

Health data needs more care than a typical app. Roles are scoped to each institution, administrators sign in with two-factor, and there is no self-service path to elevated permissions. The first system administrator is set up by hand, on purpose.

Built so long work never blocks the chat

The web app, the API and the AI service are separate, and they share one Postgres database with vector search. Retrieval and longer analysis jobs run through a queue, so a heavy request never freezes the conversation in front of the clinician.

• Web: React with TanStack Start and Query
• API: NestJS for sign-in, permissions and routes
• AI: FastAPI with LangGraph for retrieval and analysis
• Data: Postgres with pgvector, Redis for queues and rate limits

The project closed with a full handoff: a platform handbook, a route and code reference, access rules, and the deployment and operations guide, so the client’s team can run it without us.