Why Citation Links Alone Cannot Validate Healthcare RAG System Accuracy

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems used in healthcare can produce answers with working citation links that still fail factual accuracy checks, as a cited passage may only partially support a claim or describe a different population. Developers are urged to define a formal claim-to-source contract that specifies what evidence is retained for each assertion, what checks are performed, and how failures are surfaced to users. Individual sentences should be broken into separate, independently verifiable claims, since a single sentence can contain multiple assertions and one claim may require evidence from more than one passage. Source records should capture not just a URL but also a content fingerprint, extraction version, and specific passage used, because the same web address can serve updated documents over time. Teams commissioning such systems should clearly distinguish in their project scope between prototype demonstrations using handpicked sources and fully functional retrieval-backed implementations.