Every day, many different types of users visit healthcare websites. These visitors need to find doctors, appointment scheduling, treatments and procedures, insurance information, medical specialties, location or directions to the doctor’s office, and other health-related resources. When the user is unable to quickly find what they are looking for, their frustration grows, and the trust that they have in your site dwindles. With a powerful site search solution, you can provide your users with an enhanced experience by lowering the bounce rate and helping them locate the information they need faster.

Comparison Overview

Why Search Matters for Healthcare Websites

Healthcare Website visitors typically have urgent needs. The visitor may be seeking a cardiologist, researching a procedure, the location of clinics, or insurance information. If the website’s search feature does not return answers, the user will go to another source of information.

Unlike many other industries, healthcare websites contain a vast amount of clinical terminology. The healthcare providers will search using medical terms, while patients will use common language. A great search engine will bridge the gap and provide the patient with accurate responses, no matter how their search is worded.

ExpertRec: Built for Better Healthcare Search Experiences

ExpertRec has been designed to enhance the search experience for patients and providers in the healthcare field. With a user-friendly interface and fast search capabilities, ExpertRec enables organizations to build an efficient search interface without needing in-house resources.

ExpertRec can index an entire organization’s healthcare-related content, including departmental pages, physician profiles, blogs, FAQs, treatment options, and patient resources. The Advantage of having an integrated search system is that ExpertRec can interpret the intent behind searches. For example, if a patient searched for “Heart Doctor,” ExpertRec would return relevant cardiology-related pages even if the patient does not see the exact phrase anywhere on the website, making it easier for the patient to find what they are looking for and less likely to become frustrated.

Lastly, ExpertRec provides analytics to allow healthcare organizations to evaluate the way patients are currently searching for services and any gaps in their content relative to the services and/or information they provide. Understanding how to use these insights enables organizations to improve their overall search performance and ultimately develop better website strategies.

Elasticsearch: Powerful but Complex

Elasticsearch is regarded as the most flexible search technology available in 2019. Because of its extensive customization and scalability, many large organizations view it as a viable option, especially when they have dedicated technical personnel supporting their implementation efforts.

On the other hand, many healthcare organizations have struggled with the level of development work involved in implementing Elasticsearch. Development teams are almost always responsible for hosting, indexing, tuning relevance, maintaining infrastructure, and continually optimizing the system. While customization is great, the sheer volume of complexity and the associated resources needed to complete these tasks can make it more difficult for organizations to achieve a solution that is quicker and easier to implement than a standard search solution.

For healthcare websites that have a need for customizable enterprise-level solutions and have the technical capabilities to support them, Elasticsearch may be a viable option. For many organizations, however, the amount of time and resources that are needed to implement Elasticsearch may not be worth the investment.

AddSearch: Simple but Less Specialized

All the search solutions offered by AddSearch are affordable and easier to use than more specialized solutions currently available. Using a single platform that includes indexing, filtering, and search analytics, AddSearch is a simple-to-implement solution for organizations seeking a more robust search solution than what the built-in functionality of their existing website provides.

For healthcare websites, AddSearch provides enhanced discoverability and usability. However, organizations with large medical content-based websites, extensive resource libraries, or complex personalization needs may ultimately require greater customizability and more intelligent capabilities than AddSearch can provide.

In addition, although the AddSearch platform makes the implementation process simple for organizations, those organizations that deliver highly relevant patient experiences may find that ExpertRec’s features are more in line with their business objectives than AddSearch’s.

Which Solution Is Best for Healthcare Websites?

The best option for you will vary based on your organization’s requirements, available technical resources, and future growth objectives.

Elasticsearch has the most expansive range of configurations available; this search solution will require a very competent amount of skill (and ongoing management) from an IT professional. AddSearch is the simplest to deploy, but is lacking in certain areas, especially for those organizations wishing to utilize advanced levels of search intelligence.

ExpertRec is a wonderful balance between strong search functionality and relative ease of use. Healthcare organizations can make rapid progress on launching an intelligent site search and thereby improve their patient’s experience by making use of meaningful search data and lessening their reliance on the IT team.

Healthcare Search Made Simple

Help Patients Find the Right Information Faster with ExpertRec

Enable patients to quickly discover doctors, treatments, appointment pages, insurance information, locations, and healthcare resources with an AI-powered search designed for healthcare websites.

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AI Search • Medical Term Recognition • Patient-Friendly Results

Why More Healthcare Organizations Choose ExpertRec

Healthcare organizations need to ensure that their website visitors (which include patients) are able to easily locate what they are searching for on their website, while also handling a considerable amount of content. To support healthcare organizations, ExpertRec offers a simple, seamless, accurate, and lightning-fast experience when searching for healthcare providers, services, treatments, or any type of resource.

ExpertRec provides cutting-edge artificial intelligence relevance, easy-to-use implementation, fully customizable search experiences, and actionable insight analytics, all of which help healthcare organizations implement a new search solution to enhance their patient engagement and ultimately their patient satisfaction.

Final Thoughts

The patient experience someone has on a healthcare site is influenced in a big way by the search. In general, users require fast access to relevant, accurate information so they can make an informed decision regarding their health. Elasticsearch offers a lot of flexibility; however, AddSearch is very convenient. On the other hand, ExpertRec combines intelligence, ease of use, and scale – all of which are extremely important to many healthcare providers today. Therefore, if you are a hospital/clinic/medical group or healthcare provider interested in improving your patient experience while keeping it technical-free, then ExpertRec is an all-around ideal site search solution for the future.