Hadi Hasan, Safaa Salman, Adam Tai Abou Dargham +2cs.AI
Healthcare appointment scheduling remains a persistent operational bottleneck, driven by manual coordination, fragmented legacy systems, and high administrative overhead. These inefficiencies constrain provider availability and degrade patient access to care. This paper presents CareConnect, a safety-first conversational agent for healthcare logistics automation that leverages large language model (LLM) function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and layered deterministic safety guardrails. The system orchestrates eight domain-specific tools to support appointment booking, modification, cancellation, and facility information retrieval, while enforcing strict scope constraints that prohibit medical advice or diagnosis. Safety-critical situations are handled through deterministic short-circuit mechanisms for emergency detection and medical intent refusal. We evaluate CareConnect on a comprehensive benchmark of 680 task-oriented scenarios spanning end-to-end workflows, multi-turn interactions, and edge cases. Experimental results demonstrate a 91.8% task completion rate with a median per-request latency of 2.2 seconds, 96.0% safety compliance on the dedicated safety-critical evaluation subset, and an average operational cost of $0.0324 per appointment, yielding a significant cost reduction compared to manual human scheduling. These findings show that carefully scoped and rigorously safeguarded LLM-based agents can reliably automate complex healthcare operational workflows while maintaining safety guarantees and achieving substantial cost efficiency. The source code and system implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/Hadi-Hsn/CareConnect.
Navigating the deluge of heterogeneous medical data, from academic literature (PubMed) to clinical guidelines (Web) and private knowledge bases, remains a critical bottleneck for evidence-based medicine. While commercial black-box tools lack transparency, standard open-source RAG implementations frequently suffer from reasoning drift when handling complex, long-tail queries. We present DEEPMED Search, a fully open-source, agentic platform designed for transparent medical deep research. Built on a high-performance Next.js architecture, DEEPMED Search features a source-adaptive router that autonomously dispatches sub-queries to PubMed, web search, or local graph-based knowledge bases based on information density. Crucially, the platform integrates an introspective verification module, powered by a causal-consistent multi-agent debate framework, to validate retrieved evidence against diagnostic logic before synthesis. To demonstrate its robustness, we showcase DEEPMED Search's ability to autonomously decompose high-difficulty rare disease queries, filter out confounding noise, and generate structured, citation-backed research reports in minutes. By open-sourcing this software, we provide the community with a robust infrastructure to democratize access to trustworthy, glass-box medical reasoning in research and prototyping settings.
Dyslexic learners increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support reading, writing, organisation, and study-related tasks. However, their lived experiences with these tools remain largely underexamined. This paper proposes DysLexLens, a low-resource LLM framework, designed to analyse dyslexic learners experience with AI through online forum discussions. DysLexLens is designed as an end-to-end, evidence-traceable architecture which transforms noisy social media posts into a dictionary-driven corpora, provides knowledge-graph (KG)-based question reasoning, generates verifiable query responses, and enables response evaluation through quantitative and human-grounded assessment. DysLexLens has four key features. First, it employs a dictionary-driven filtering method to construct a more focused Reddit corpus on dyslexia and AI, filtering out noisy and weakly related posts to improve the relevance of data collected from low-resource forum contexts. Second, it integrates LLM-assisted semantic analysis with KG-based query reasoning to uncover meaningful patterns. Third, it has quantitative evaluation metrics (RAGAS and Query Robustness) to measure LLM-generated response performance. Fourth, it provides structured qualitative validation guidelines for assessing response quality, with a specific focus on hallucination and evidence alignment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DysLexLens using dyslexia-related Reddit forum data and 30 questions. The results show its potential generalisability to other low-resource forum data contexts. DysLexLens, sample data, questions and evaluation results are available at Github to support reproducibility.
High-stakes reasoning tasks necessitate transparent and verifiable workflows, yet conventional single-model large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucination and low interpretability under zero-shot paradigms. To address this general AI challenge, we propose a Multi-Agent Audit Framework that simulates a collaborative, multi-step verification process. We empirically validate this architecture in the sensitive domain of clinical mental health screening using a modular LangChain workflow. Our framework decomposes the reasoning process into a Perception Agent, Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Chain-of-Thought (CoT) clinical inference, and a critical Audit verification stage. We evaluated this framework on the DAIC-WOZ dataset using locally deployed open-source models. Experimental results demonstrate that our multi-agent pipeline significantly outperforms single-agent baselines, reducing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for PHQ-8 depression severity prediction from 5.35 to 5.02. By exposing cross-agent validation traces, the framework mitigates reasoning drift and provides highly interpretable diagnostic rationales, offering a generalizable paradigm for reliable AI-assisted decision support beyond isolated model scaling. We make data and code open access on GitHub for replicability.