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Introducing the NHIA Community AI Assistant

By NHIA Member Services posted 10-14-2025 08:00

  

Introducing the NHIA Community AI Assistant 

Faster answers from sources you can trust 

If you’ve ever thought, “I know someone in the NHIA Community has already answered this,” our new AI Assistant will feel like magic. It’s designed to help you find the right information quickly—and always show where that information came from. 

How it works

The assistant is community-powered. Most of the information it has access to is not accessible to public AI models. It retrieves and summarizes information from: 

  • NHIA Community discussions (nearly 2,000 and growing) 

  • The member resource library (uploaded documents, guides, tools) 

  • Official NHIA content (policies, announcements, and resources) 

It uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to pull the most relevant NHIA sources first, then provides a clear, conversational answer with citations back to the original content—so you can verify details and explore deeper. 

Important: The assistant does not create new knowledge about clinical practice or policy. It prioritizes NHIA’s trusted content and cites its sources. If it can’t find a reliable source, it will say so and invite you to Ask Your Fellow Humans to tap our expert community. 

Privacy, safety, and guardrails 

  • Secure by design: Powered by Azure OpenAI or IBM watsonx, with industry-leading security. Requests are processed securely. 

  • No training on member data: The assistant does not use NHIA content or your questions to train a public model. 

  • Citations required: It is prevented from answering without suitable sources from our community/official content. 

  • Humans in the loop: When needed, the assistant prompts you to post your question for member input—growing the knowledge base over time. 

What you can ask it to do 

  • Clinical & operations: “What do you put in your ana kits?” 
    You’ll get a practical summary drawn from prior NHIA threads and files—with citations to review full context. Need nuance (e.g., pediatrics)? Click Ask Your Fellow Humans and the post is drafted for you. 

  • Billing & Reimbursement: “How do you bill for waste?” 
    Expect a concise summary with links to top threads where members shared approaches and audit considerations. 

  • Education discovery: “Do we have education on sterile compounding beyond-use dating?” 
    The assistant can surface webinars and NHIA education that match your topic, alongside related discussions. 

  • Pharmacy & compounding: “How do you extrapolate stability data for elastomerics?” 
    You’ll see pointers to relevant discussions so you can review the details directly. 

Tips for great results 

  • Be specific. Add context (drug, setting, payer, state) to narrow retrieval. 

  • Review the citations. The AI Assistant can make mistakes. The citations are your fastest path to full context on where answers are coming from and will help your research to determine your own conclusions. 

  • Use the button. If the assistant can’t fully answer, you want more detail, or to cover additional nuances, Ask Your Fellow Humans starts a discussion with one click. 

  • Legacy Search. You can still access a full list of standard search results below the AI Assistant. 

What’s next 

We’ll continue tuning the assistant and exploring focused agents for research and events, along with ongoing improvements to tagging and retrieval so you get even sharper results. 

Try it now 

  1. Go to community.nhia.org and type a question into the search bar. 

  1. Read the assistant’s summary and check the citations. 

  1. Tap Ask Your Fellow Humans if you want broader input. 

Tell us what you think 

If something looks inaccurate—or you have a suggestion—email membership@nhia.org.

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