AI Donor Assistant Case Study
Merakāta partnered with a premier marrow donor program to design and develop an AI-powered donor assistant chatbot to support bone marrow donors through the donation process. The project aimed to provide donors with immediate, accurate answers to frequently asked questions by leveraging the organization's existing documentation and approved informational resources.
The Challenge
Coordinators faced increasing demand from newly matched donors seeking timely information about the donation process, recovery, travel reimbursement, and next steps. Donors required reassuring, accurate guidance at any hour, without placing additional burden on coordination staff. Existing documentation was spread across standard operating procedures and public-facing web resources, making it difficult to surface the right information quickly. A scalable solution was needed that could ground responses in authoritative sources, respond to questions consistently, and maintain a tone appropriate for donors who may be anxious about the process.
The Solution
Merakāta designed and deployed a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture built entirely on Microsoft Azure, hosted within a secure virtual private network. Source documents, including internal SOPs and approved public web content, were ingested, chunked, and indexed using Azure AI Search, with embeddings generated via Azure OpenAI. A .NET web application serves as the donor-facing interface, combining hybrid vector and keyword search to retrieve the most relevant content before passing it to an LLM model to generate grounded, formatted responses. The system included a configuration option to cite its sources with every answer, allowing executives to see which SOPs the answer was generated from and update them if they were out of date. The AI Donor Assistant also gracefully defers to a human coordinator when questions fall outside the scope of available documentation or intended use.
The Results
The Donor Assistant successfully provides donors with immediate, accurate, and empathetic responses grounded in the organization's own documentation. The solution reduces the informational burden on coordinators while ensuring donors receive consistent guidance aligned with established SOPs. By building on Azure's enterprise-grade infrastructure, the solution is positioned to scale and adapt as documentation evolves and compliance requirements mature.