Hospitals can improve patient trust and retention by implementing advanced search features. Prioritizing relevance, healthcare-specific needs, and user-friendly design ensures patients easily find doctors, services, or info. Here's an overview of those best practices.
Patients visit hospital websites for specific, timely needs. They want to find a doctor, learn about symptoms, and locate the nearest treatment centers. They might also want to check their insurance and set an appointment. Quickly finding information is key.
Hospitals and health systems have adapted to this market shift by adding lots of information to their websites to meet various visitor needs. This creates a discoverability challenge: getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
Most hospitals have opted to solve this problem by implementing advanced search on their website.
Search is a turning point in a user's journey. It's their "last resort" if they haven't found what they seek via the main website navigation.
When patients can quickly find relevant health content, doctors, and services through advanced search, their perception of care quality improves.
However, if patients' fact-finding mission is clunky or inconclusive, they either reach out to patient services (pressuring that team's staff), or they explore alternative providers' websites.
Fortunately, implementing clear best practices can make search a highlight of the digital patient journey. I've categorized them into 3 groups: increasing relevance, healthcare-specific considerations and user-centric design.
Tagging your content with metadata will improve the quality of search results. It will also suggest similar content. This will help organize your website’s information and meet diverse search needs.
By grouping content by "content-type" and assigning categories/taxonomies to them in your website's back-end, you will be able to add filters to your search results page (also known as "faceted search"). This will allow patients to view only results related to physicians or drugs for example.
If your organization operates in different cities or states, add relevance by sorting results based on distance to the patient's location (ie: closest clinic).
Despite constant improvements in the digital client journey, patients likely need to fill out some forms (either online or to print out). Your search module should be able to index forms and PDFs to streamline the patient flow.
The healthcare industry has specific legal requirements that should be considered when implementing search. Content returned by search needs to be credible and compliant with regulatory guidelines (e.g., FDA for drug information). Algorithms should protect user data and be compliant with HIPAA. Finally, results must adhere to ADA, Section 508 and WCAG accessibility guidelines so that individuals with disabilities can access and interact with them.
The majority of visits to hospital websites now come from handheld devices (mobile phones or tablets). While most institutions now present a mobile-friendly version of their website, the mobile search functionality is often cumbersome to use. This is even more prevalent for advanced search because of its use of filters and other options to customize search results. Help your patients find the right information on the go by taking the time to optimize the design of your advanced search options and results specifically for mobile.
Optimizing the search box experience as the visitor types can speed up searches and improve result relevance. Sophisticated backend search modules can auto-complete words as they are typed, suggest similar relevant search terms and find results for synonyms that can be customized. AI integrations can also improve search by using natural language processing. It can interpret queries and help users find what they need without knowing exact medical terms.
Advanced search isn’t just a feature—it's a trust-builder and a key differentiator in patient acquisition and retention.
By ensuring information is easily accessible through relevant and user-friendly search features, hospitals enhance the patient experience, demonstrate commitment to care, and foster stronger patient relationships—ultimately leading to better health outcomes.
How might implementing advanced search features transform the patient experience at your healthcare facility?
PS: As a complement to this article I’ll soon be writing a piece about the technical considerations to keep in mind when implementing advanced search.
