Status: Delivered. Described from our own delivery records. Client identity, brand and commercial terms are withheld. Figures, where given, cover the period stated and nothing beyond it.
Context
A revenue-cycle operation holding account-level data covering healthcare patients.
Operational and commercial staff regularly needed answers from that data. They could not write SQL, and the data team's queue was the only route.
The problem
- Every ad-hoc question became a ticket, and the answer arrived after the moment that prompted it.
- The data team's capacity was consumed by one-off queries.
- Self-service BI covers the anticipated questions; it does not cover the unanticipated ones, which are often the important ones.
- The data includes personally identifiable and health-related information, so any approach that sent it to a hosted model was out of scope before it was discussed.
What we built
A locally hosted large language model
A thirty-billion-parameter model deployed on the client's own on-premises server, with nothing traversing the network boundary.
Schema grounding
So the model translates a question into a query against the actual database structure rather than a guessed one.
A prompt interface accepting voice or text
Returning results in seconds.
How we delivered it
- 1
Establish the boundary first
What may run where, confirmed with the client's compliance position before any model was selected.
- 2
Provision on-premises infrastructure
Sized for the model.
- 3
Ground on the schema
Iterating against a set of real questions staff had previously asked the data team.
- 4
Constrain what the interface may do
Read paths only, scoped to what the asking user is permitted to see.
- 5
Pilot with a small group
Of non-technical users, measured against the answers the data team would have given.
How it was phased
Indicative phasing for work of this shape. Actual duration varies with data quality, access and decision speed.
What the client keeps
- The deployment and its configuration
- Schema grounding artefacts
- The evaluation question set
- Permission scoping rules
- Infrastructure documentation