Connecting Patients and Providers: A Guide to Upgrading Provider Search for Children’s Hospitals

Parents navigating a child’s illness aren’t just looking for care — they're looking for trust. They're looking for someone who can diagnose and treat, but also someone who understands the anxiety behind every appointment. At a time when emotions are running high, we must ask: how can we design a provider directory that speaks to the heart as well as the head? One that eases anxiety instead of adding to it?

We can begin by giving as much information as we can.

Provider integrations.

The relationship between a medical provider and their patient is a deeply personal one. A patient doesn’t just want someone with a degree — they want someone with experience. Someone they can trust. Someone who will listen.

So, how do you prove experience, personality, and trust on a cold and static website? You have to make sure it’s not static at all by fully expanding the background of each provider through data integrations.

Centralized provider data.

The first step is to centralize everything that proves a provider’s skill and create a unified data model that accurately reflects each provider’s credentials, specialties, practice locations, and accepted insurance. You might create a headless solution that integrates dozens of different data sources, or you may house content within the content management system with enhancements from beyond.

Regardless, the point is to make it easy for the editorial team to add to each provider’s profile, which in turn helps expand and enrich each providers public identity.

Intelligent system relationships.

Within the content management system itself, relationships between content types help fill out a provider’s story. In other words, integrations aren’t the only way to hype up your providers — you can also lean on traditional CMS logic.

Intelligent relationships within the content model — such as displaying team affiliations, linked specialties, and proximity to patient locations — will create a more complete and context-aware experience for users navigating complex care options, especially as they narrow down from specialty to sub-specialty.

Expanding the lore.

Research articles that highlight trailblazing advancements. Videos that show personality and begin to build trust. Provider ratings. Specialties and sub-specialties. Testimonials. Every provider needs a background story.

Medical issues can be scary, so you want to know that your provider is not only an expert, but a real person. A rich and detailed profile page proves each provider’s expertise without the risk of looking like a cold and lifeless set of citations and medical terms.

Improving search.

These kinds of improvements are crucial to helping patients get the full picture of a provider’s expertise and experience, but they don’t mean anything if they can’t be found. Let’s take a look at how we can improve search within the provider listing.

Faceted search and filters.

There are hundreds (if not thousands!) of factors that go into choosing a provider. Providing a detailed set of options, patients and their support team can feel confident that they’re selecting the correct provider for their situation.

For example, Blend’s helped design and develop search filtering for two children’s hospitals, including faceted search functionality that allowed users to refine results by:

• Condition treated
• Specialty or subspecialty
• Location or clinic proximity
• Language spoken
• Gender of provider
• Appointment availability
• Accepted insurance

Natural language and synonym matching.

Remember that patients are not physicians. They do not have decades of familiarity with medical terminology — all they know is that something is wrong, and they need help.

It’s important to keep in mind that users often search using plain language (“ENT” or even “ear infection doctor” instead of “otolaryngologist”), which means search results need to include allowances and translation for plain language terms. The best bet is to work with search tools that integrate a synonym library or AI tools that interpret user intent and match terms to clinical equivalents. This lowers the barrier to entry for non-expert users and improves overall relevance in results.

Predictive search with real-time feedback.

While synonyms help “translate” the world of medical terminology, they’re only helpful if you have a general idea of where you’re going. For those who have absolutely no idea where to start, we can turn to predictive search and autosuggest.

The goal of this type of search is to offer real-time suggestions based on the most common queries, trending conditions, and provider names. This not only accelerates the search process but also helps guide users toward the most effective queries — which not only makes things easier and a bit more clear to those who are really in the dark, but it also improves the mobile experience as there is less of a need for browsing a complicated search form.

Streamlining connections.

Of course, finding the right provider is only part of the equation. Provider connections — whether by booking an appointment, calling a clinic, or asking a question — work best when they are fast, seamless, and low-friction. It’s not enough to slap a “CONTACT US” button at the bottom of the page: the best time to help a patient is at the moment they need help.

Action-oriented provider profiles.

First, profile pages need clear next steps. This might look something like:

• Prominent “Schedule Appointment” buttons that drive patients directly into the system for faster scheduling.
• Direct links to affiliated locations and services
• Clear contact information with tap-to-call capabilities on mobile
• Each page has a hierarchy of information, so make a strategic decision to highlight primary actions (“book now,” “call,” or “see available times”) and keep them clear and omnipresent.

Smart routing for scheduling.

Not all providers accept new patients or have the same scheduling systems, which is not only difficult to program but also difficult for patients to navigate. Integration with scheduling systems needs to be both flexible enough to work with different scheduling systems while being standardized enough to lower patient confusion.

This often means allowing for multiple potential paths. Direct integration with larger systems, in which a patient can schedule directly from a page or module, might work for the majority of patients, but additional conditional routing to third-party scheduling platforms — as well as custom messaging for providers not currently accepting patients — will save the frustration of walking down a path that will not resolve.

Also, if you take anything away from this article, it should be this simple rule: link your telephone numbers. Click- or touch-to-call links make everything a billion times easier.

Location and map integration.

Larger children's hospital and health system providers often practice across multiple campuses or clinics. Bring this information to the patient and help them understand location and availability through embedded interactive maps and location filters that allow users to search by geographic proximity.

Connecting providers and patients.

For hospitals and health systems, especially those focused on pediatrics, provider directories are a crucial tool. Patients want information, and they want clarity — the traditional “name, title, phone number” approach is no longer useful.

By focusing on robust system integrations, user-friendly search, and streamlined, action-oriented connections, health systems can meet patients where they are. Health systems looking to modernize their digital experience should view the provider directory not as a static list, but as a dynamic, integrated piece of their patient engagement ecosystem.

After all, when it comes down to it — beyond the technology, and beyond the facilities — treatment requires people, and it requires confidence.