Healthcare Provider Sorting - Department Heads

Search Best Practices - Search Configuration
1

Hi Team,

My client is looking to take advantage of entity sorting for their Healthcare providers! They have a sorting mechanism in place on their website today that we’d like to take advantage of (outlined below).

Sort 0:
Department Heads

Sort 1:
MD or DO

Sort 2:
Nurse Practitioners or Physician Assistants

Sort 3: Other

I followed the Entity Sorting training module and the implementation seems relatively straight forward. I plan on sorting by relevance and a custom field “Sort order” using the structure above.

This gets complicated as there are a number on instances in which a provider is the Department Head of department x, but is also a part of department y. For example, let’s say Dr. Smith is the head of the Cardiology department, and thus has a value of 0 in the sort order custom field. When querying for Cardiology I would expect Dr. Smith to appear first. However, Dr. Smith is also a member of the Pulmonology, but NOT the department head. Given that Dr. Smith has a value of 0 in the sort order custom field, I imagine that he would appear first in the results of a Pulmonology query.

Does anyone have some advice in terms of how I can account for the fact that a provider may be the head of one department but also a member of another department?

Thank you!
Austin

2

Hi Austin,

I don’t think entity sorting can support this use case - we can’t configure the sorting based of the query or detected applied filters. How do they currently accomplish the sorting for doctors in multiple departments?

3

Hi Amani,

Thanks for the response! We’ve decided to forgo sorting by Department heads and utilize the existing structure outlined in my post.

Best,
Austin