Most support mistakes cost time. Some cost trust in a way you cannot refund. On a clinic site, a fluent invented answer about symptoms, medication, or “whether that sounds serious” is not a cute hallucination story — it is a product failure mode you must design against on purpose.
Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it is a compliance checklist. This is a product posture: prefer refusal and a person over improvisation.
What the bot may answer
- Published admin facts: hours, location, parking, how to book
- Links to official patient portals or forms you index on purpose
- Clear statements that it cannot advise on clinical questions
What it must refuse
Anything diagnostic, interpretive, or personalised to symptoms. If it is not on an approved page, the answer is a refusal plus an obvious human path — same-day phone, triage nurse line, emergency guidance as your organisation publishes it. Do not let the model “be helpful” into a grey zone.
Evaluation is non-negotiable
- Ask clinical-sounding questions absent from your site — expect refusal
- Ask admin paraphrases — expect consistent cited facts
- Ask for a person — expect one-turn handoff with context
Index narrowly. Prefer single URL and curated pages over whole-site crawl if your CMS mixes clinical content with marketing. When in doubt, leave it out of the index.
