Provider Search should not be a new concept for all of us. If you worked on healthcare project, then most likely you would have come across Provider Search. On the other hand, even if you are not part of healthcare industry and you are not in IT field you would have used Provider Search concept in your day-to-day life.
Provider Search is integral part of any healthcare organization IT system. We can say a journey of patients start with Provider Search. If you are looking for a provider for wellness check or because of any unwanted medical incident, the first thing that we do is to visit our insurance provider website and use provider search feature to find a provider that meets our need.
Provider Search may sound simple concept, but it is very important feature of healthcare provider or payer website and most of the payer and provider IT team put lot of efforts to provide a great experience to patient or member.
What is expected in a good Provider Search module?
Imagine what you are going to do if no provider search is offered by your insurance provider, or you do not get provider search module in healthcare facility that you are planning to go. This may appear imagination for some of you but if you have seen life before Internet then this was reality. If we have to find a provider, then we use phone book or address book to get contact details of providers and we start calling them one by one to find out the provider who can help.
Sometimes we find a provider but when we visit, we find out he or she is not accepting new patients or not affiliated with my insurance provider. You can imagine the risk if we are running out of time.
This may not be everything but some of the key information we need when we use provider search module is listed below. Also, we would expect to have option to search and filter on these attributes.
- Provider Name (we want to know the name even it does not matter if provider name is John Smith or Robin Davis)
- Specialty (we do not want to go to the dentist if we are looking for provider with specialist in cardiovascular disease)
- Address (If I am in Chicago I may not be interested in a provider from Phoenix)
- In Network? (important to know if the provider is supported by my insurance companies)
- Accepting New Patients (Do not want to call each provider and ask if they are accepting new patients or not)
- Gender (sometime this is important if the patient is not comfortable with opposite gender provider)
- Working Hours (you have to plan your availability accordingly)
- Educations, affiliations with different institutions, experiences, ratings etc. (we try to get as much information as possible)
- User Experience (it should be easy and intuitive to use the provider search module)
- Ability to enable this to internal user, experience users and guest users
- Ability to perform actions on provider record like sending email, creating referral, booking appointments etc..
Does Health Cloud Provider Search fulfill these needs?
In my 20+ years of CRM experience, I have experienced multiple custom solutions for provider search. We implemented provider search with provider data in Salesforce or using on-demand integration to develop provider search. All these solutions were custom, not flexible and always expensive and time-consuming to manage.
Last few years Salesforce Healthcare capabilities are going through transformations. Salesforce Health Cloud is core of this transformation. Salesforce innovation team is adding (improving) all necessary healthcare capabilities to Salesforce Health Cloud in every release.
Provider Search is one of these capabilities that have gone through this transformation journey. If you are working on an old Health Cloud org you may find legacy provider search (not aligned to new provider data model).
Today Salesforce is offering two provider search modules that may co-exists together.
- Provider Search: You can enable provider search with no code solution, and you just need to do some basic configuration. It is based on new provider data model, and you would be able to enable provider search in few hours. This is fully functional solution that internally uses Data Processing Engine to move necessary search data from different Salesforce Object to “Care Provider Searchable Field”. Salesforce provides a lightning component that you just need to drop to Salesforce flex page or experience cloud pages as needed.
- Provider Search with Criteria-Based Search and Filter: Salesforce provides a detail comparison for you to decide which one to use. I believe this is the future of provider search and my personal recommendation would be to use this. Some of the features like map support, experience cloud support is getting delivered as part of Summer 24 release, so I do not see any other reason to not use this new provider search module. This is based on OmniStudio module and provides ability to configure your own flex card to style it as needed. It supports search from “Care Provider Searchable Field” object (recommended) but you can use your own custom object and custom process (Data Processing Engine or alternate solution). You can also configure your actions using OmniScript or Salesforce Lightning flow on selected provider record
You can go ahead with any of these two modules, and you would be able to enable provider search without doing any customizations. Both the solutions are intuitive and provides great user experience.
Summary
This article covers the importance of Provider Search in Patient 360 experience. Salesforce Health Cloud Provider Search is no code solution that provides a fully functional provider search module for Internal Users (Call Center Agents, Care Coordinators etc..), Experience Cloud Users (Patients, Members, Partners etc..) and guest users to your experience cloud portal.
Salesforce has provided great documentation with step-by-step instructions to enable Provider Search & Criteria Based Provider Search. Refer the link here