Overview
Empowering patients to find the right care begins with an understanding of their individual needs. Our patient search refiner is a pre-search refinement tool that asks patients health-related questions to narrow down search results for more precise patient-provider matching. By collecting information about a patient's needs upfront, we can deliver automatically refined search results to streamline the search for care. Patients have the ability to bypass the flow entirely, or navigate back to modify their answers.
Details
This feature is focused on a short-list of specialty searches that currently yield broad results. For instance, a search for “orthopedics” today returns any orthopedist for any body part. With the patient search refiner, this search will prompt patients to specify the body part that needs care before populating search results. By including only the specialists that match the patient’s selection, the patient has a more focused result set to evaluate and select care.
Two conditions must be met in order to trigger the patient search refiner:
The specialty contains at least 1 refinement option that leads to search results. This ensures we do not needlessly trigger the refiner flow for specialties that the Health System does not have. Otherwise, it would lead the user to 0 search results.
The user searches for a broad specialty (or any of its synonyms)
specialty searches selected from typeahead/autocomplete
free-text searches (i.e., searches that do not leverage typeahead/autocomplete)
deep link searches configured by the customer
Example Flow
- Patient searches for "Cardiology" and is presented various care options related to cardiology:
2.Patient selects "Specific Heart Conditions" and is presented with provider options and care descriptions:
3. Patient selects which description best fits their need and is presented with providers unique to this need. The search team is updated in the search bar based on the determined care:
Supported Specialties
The following specialties are supported for Patient Search Refiner. Health systems can configure which specialties will trigger the patient search refiner based on their available clinical data and associated providers.
Allergy and Immunology
Audiology
Bariatric Medicine
Behavioral Health
Cancer Care
Cardiology
Cardiothoracic Surgery
Dentistry
Dermatology
Dietetics
Endocrinology
Gastroenterology
General Surgery
Hematology
Hematology Oncology
Nephrology
Neurology
Neurosurgery
Orthopedic Surgery
Otolaryngology (ENT)
Physical Therapy
Primary Care
Urology
Weight Management
Women's Health
Wound Care
Feature Goals
The patient search refiner aims to:
Enhance the accuracy of patient-to-provider matches
Ensure patients book appointments with the most suitable provider for their needs
Improve the patient search experience and guide them to the right care, faster