Why medical AI needs citations
A foundational question for clinical AI: how can clinicians trust AI-generated guidance? Citations are not a "nice to have", they are a requirement, and getting them right means going beyond simple document references to exact, verifiable source quotes.
If a colleague gives clinical advice but can't explain the basis, you'd want to verify it before acting. Medical AI is no different. When clinicians rely on AI for guidance on guidelines or patient data, every output must be traceable to a reliable source.
RAG grounds AI responses in documents, but that only solves half the problem. Without citations you still have a black box: you know the model consulted sources, but not which parts of the answer came from which document, or whether it represented them accurately. The article explains why document-level references are not enough, and how exact-quote citations change the verification calculus entirely.
Published on the Delphyr Engineering blog, January 2026.