
How to Build a RAG System for Healthcare: Minimize Hallucinations in LLM Outputs
Last Updated on August 29, 2025 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Marie Humbert-Droz, PhD
Originally published on Towards AI.
Building Trustworthy Healthcare LLM Systems — Part 2
In our previous post, we explored why hallucinations occur in Large Language Models and the particular risks they pose in healthcare settings. We also set up a process to download relevant medical literature from PubMed Central to build our knowledge base. Now, let’s transform that medical corpus into a functional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to minimize hallucinations in healthcare applications.
The article elaborates on the construction of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for healthcare, aimed at mitigating hallucinations by effectively incorporating external knowledge sources and verified medical literature. It details the implementation steps, including document processing, embedding creation, and setting up a query engine using specific frameworks like LlamaIndex. The discussion includes chunking strategies, specialized medical embedding options, and relevant performances metrics for evaluating the RAG system’s effectiveness. Finally, it addresses the challenges faced and underscores the need for continuous improvement in building trustworthy healthcare AI systems.
Read the full blog for free on Medium.
Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.
Published via Towards AI
Take our 90+ lesson From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer Certification: From choosing a project to deploying a working product this is the most comprehensive and practical LLM course out there!
Towards AI has published Building LLMs for Production—our 470+ page guide to mastering LLMs with practical projects and expert insights!

Discover Your Dream AI Career at Towards AI Jobs
Towards AI has built a jobs board tailored specifically to Machine Learning and Data Science Jobs and Skills. Our software searches for live AI jobs each hour, labels and categorises them and makes them easily searchable. Explore over 40,000 live jobs today with Towards AI Jobs!
Note: Content contains the views of the contributing authors and not Towards AI.