RACGP / BMJ-style note generation: how we get cited references right

The 'LLM hallucinated a citation' problem is well-documented. Less well-documented is what to actually do about it inside a clinical product.

Three rules we follow

• The LLM never writes a citation it didn't retrieve. Citations come from a curated, version-pinned knowledge base — RACGP, BMJ Best Practice, NICE, USPSTF.
• Every citation in a generated note is clickable and resolves to a live page on the source publisher. Broken links fail the response check.
• The retrieval step happens before the generation step. The LLM sees the relevant guidance text as context; it doesn't go fishing for it on its own.

Why this matters in practice

Without these rules, an LLM will invent plausible-sounding references. With them, you get fewer references, but every one of them resolves. Clinicians have started using the generated citations as a CPD trigger — they click through, the source page opens, they get half an hour of reading attributed to that consult automatically.

The product surface that emerges is unfamiliar but useful: a scribe that writes notes, surfaces evidence, and quietly handles the CPD paperwork in the background.