LLMs in Production: Structuring Unstructured Speech
An LLM that returns prose is a demo. An LLM that returns validated structure is a product.
The jump from prototype to product is structure. For clinical documentation, I don't want a paragraph — I want symptoms, diagnoses, treatment steps, materials, and follow-ups as typed fields. Reasoning-capable models extract that from messy dialogue when prompted with the right schema.
Reliability comes from constraints: schema-constrained outputs, validation on every response, and graceful fallbacks when confidence is low. The model proposes; the system verifies.
I treat prompts as code — versioned, reviewed, and tested against real transcripts — because a prompt change is a behavior change, and behavior changes deserve the same rigor as any deploy.
Vivek Jalondhara
Full Stack Software Engineer