Building the future of medical knowledge search

Building the next-generation AI-powered medical knowledge search for Finland's healthcare professionals

SearchLLMsRAGProduct DesignNLPMedical

The Client

Duodecim is the leading medical knowledge provider and publisher in Finland, serving over 15 million search queries yearly for medical professionals. Their services are used daily in virtually all Finnish healthcare institutions. Duodecim has always been at the forefront of medical technology innovation, pioneering electronic databases and clinical decision support systems.

The Challenge

As AI technologies rapidly evolve, Duodecim needed a safe way to experiment with and apply them while keeping Finnish healthcare connected to a trusted knowledge provider. This required reimagining access to 100,000+ medical documents, building trust in Finnish-language AI answers, and strengthening the team's ability to responsibly evaluate emerging AI.

Our Approach

We partnered with Duodecim to build D-Haku (D-Search), a proprietary hybrid search engine combining traditional keyword search with modern semantic search. Our focus was understanding medical professionals' unique needs and translating them into an intuitive, fast, and reliable intentfaces.

Early test version of AI powered hybrid search combining keyword and semantic search across 1.3M+ document chunks

Finnish Language Optimization

Custom chunking strategy that preserves medical context while handling the complexities of Finnish grammar and terminology across 100,000+ documents, creating 1.3M+ searchable chunks.

Agentive Search

Multi-step search that allows the AI to autonomously build context using Duodecim's proprietary knowledge, intelligently combining multiple search strategies to be able to answer complex clinical questions.

Generative AI Summaries

Creates contextual search summaries and snippet answers for QA-style questions, helping healthcare professionals quickly find relevant parts of the information.

Reference System

Built-in citation and reference tracking maintains trust and verification. Every AI-generated answer includes clear source attribution for medical professionals to verify against original documents.

Importance of UX in creating trust between medical professionals and AI

We're designing D-Haku's user experience to prioritize clarity, trust, and ease of verification for medical professionals. This means making it easy to distinguish between AI-generated summaries and direct quotes from verified sources, while ensuring that AI-generated content can be quickly validated against trusted medical documents.

Hover interactions showing source documents and verification

Working with Intentface has been excellent, and we saw results quickly, which has led to an expansion and deepening of our collaboration.

Samuli Asmala

CTO, Kuura Health / Duodecim

We've build the foundations for Duodecim's generative AI journey together with Intentface. Their expertise in building AI-powered search solutions has been invaluable as we navigate the evolving landscape of medical knowledge delivery.

Jani Tikkanen

CEO, Kuura Health / Duodecim

Technical Stack

Frontend

TypeScript, React

Backend

Node.js, Python,

AI/ML

Multiple embedding models, Reranking models, RAG architecture, Hybrid search algorithms, Custom finnish lemmatizer, Evals

Impact

Together with Duodecim we're creating the new standard for Finnish medical knowledge search. The hybrid approach ensures both precision for specific medical terms and understanding for complex clinical questions, handling Finnish language challenges while maintaining reliability and speed critical for healthcare decision-making.