IMAS: A Comprehensive Agentic Approach to Rural Healthcare Delivery

Abstract: Since the onset of COVID-19, rural communities worldwide have faced significant challenges in accessing healthcare due to the migration of experienced medical professionals to urban centers. Semi-trained caregivers, such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs), have stepped in to fill this gap, but often lack formal training. This paper proposes an advanced agentic medical assistant system designed to improve healthcare delivery in rural areas by utilizing LLMs and agentic approaches. The system is composed of five crucial components: translation, medical complexity assessment, expert network integration, final medical advice generation, and response simplification. Our innovative framework ensures context-sensitive, adaptive, and reliable medical assistance, capable of clinical triaging, diagnostics, and identifying cases requiring specialist intervention. The system is designed to handle cultural nuances and varying literacy levels, providing clear and actionable medical advice in local languages. Evaluation results using the MedQA, PubMedQA, and JAMA datasets demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly enhances the effectiveness of rural healthcare workers, making healthcare more accessible and understandable for underserved populations. All code and supplemental materials associated with the paper and IMAS are available at https://github.com/uheal/imas.