“Find a Doctor” (FAD) tools are usually the most important feature of healthcare websites, yet they often frustrate website visitors and editors alike because they’re painful both to use and to update. They also risk HIPAA violation, because when they ask visitors what kind of care they need, that information can wind up in Google Analytics (or similar) right alongside the searcher’s personal data.

Drupal healthcare sites can solve these problems! We’ll describe how, using our work with the Lehigh Valley Health Network as an example. This is an especially valuable use case because, ever since we launched the site in 2019, LVHN have given us an unusually free hand to constantly revise and improve it. This has been an invaluable opportunity to battle-test and refine the approaches we’ll share in this session.

First, we’ll show attendees the most effective tools for editing doctor information, laying out both the strategy and the site-building techniques they can use to do the same.

Then, we’ll describe the FAD search mechanism that yields our best ever user-response metrics: a 100% front-end autocomplete with cached responses. While slightly technical, this part of the talk has the aim of helping decision-makers guide their development teams away from the traditional tools (e.g. Solr, Elasticsearch) they might otherwise turn to.

Finally, we’ll show attendees how to collect the site analytics they need from a FAD page while steering clear of private visitor information.