Mike O’Neil
2026
ClinQueryAgent: A Conversational Agent for Population Health Management
Joseph Spartacus Boyle | Anthony Michael Dranfield | Mike O’Neil | Maria Liakata | Alison Q. Smithard
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Joseph Spartacus Boyle | Anthony Michael Dranfield | Mike O’Neil | Maria Liakata | Alison Q. Smithard
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
In this paper we introduce CLINQUERYAGENT, a system for translating natural language population health questions into executable database queries using agents with access to both local and external knowledge bases. Our novel architecture enables the use of powerful cloud-based language models whilst ensuring that no patient data leaves the secure environment. To combat inaccuracies over the course of longer dialogues due to context rot, information retrieval is delegated to a sub-agent. We deploy the system via a chat window embedded within an existing population health management platform where it has been used by 128 staff from 15 healthcare practices covering a total of 148,319 patients in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). We evaluate the system’s capacity to autonomously handle a range of health informatics tasks on three datasets and via a beta-testing phase. Our results show that both analysts and clinicians are able to easily generate actionable information from patient health records using natural language requests requiring no programming expertise to verify. A public demo of the system is available to try: https://clinqueryagent.josephsboyle.com/