The Ohio State University College of Dentistry

Dental students must recall and integrate knowledge from thousands of hours of lectures and clinical protocols spanning 100+ courses across basic and clinical sciences. Accessing contextually relevant, curriculum-aligned information at the point of care during clinical rotations was a significant challenge, with students forced to manually search through disparate textbooks, notes, and clinical references.

The college built POCAA (Point Of Care Chairside Academic Assistant) on Amazon Q Business using a RAG-based architecture. The system was trained exclusively on the college's own Pre-Doctoral and Dental Hygiene curriculum — 9,000+ artifacts across 100+ courses including lecture recordings, presentations, and syllabi. Students query the system in natural language and receive source-attributed, faculty-vetted responses that integrate knowledge across multiple dental disciplines.

POCAA is currently in pilot rollout to faculty and students, with ongoing refinement of query guardrails and a sourcing accuracy model. The system provides 24/7 availability with automated ingestion of new course materials via Canvas API integration. It also supports curriculum quality improvement by surfacing redundancies, gaps, and inconsistencies through analysis of user query patterns — a capability described as first-of-its-kind at Ohio State.

• Training an LLM exclusively on institutional curriculum (rather than general web data) ensures source reliability and faculty-vetted accuracy, which is critical for clinical education contexts.
• RAG architecture with citation tracking allows students to verify answers and builds confidence in AI-assisted decision-making.
• Capturing and analyzing user queries provides a secondary benefit: continuous curriculum evaluation that helps faculty identify gaps and redundancies at scale.