Step 1: Set Up the Healthcare Taxonomy

Why this step matters: When using Yext Search for healthcare-related search experiences like Find-a-Doctors, the search configuration benefits greatly from having healthcare-specific terms within Yext Content. Ideally, these terms connect clinical terminology like “nephrolithiasis” to nonclinical terminology like “kidney stones”. Installing a Healthcare Taxonomy (either Yext’s or your own) will drastically improve the quality of your healthcare search experience.

Setup

Content

Configure a linked system that identifies a provider’s specialties, conditions treated, procedures performed, and subspecialties. For convenience, Yext provides two options:

1. Configurable Yext-Provided Taxonomy:

   • Recommended
   • Uses Yext Content capacity
   • Provides a set of ~9,000 entities with medical terms
   • To use: Consult this Hitchhikers Guide: Install Healthcare Taxonomy Solution App

2. Configurable Client-Provided Taxonomy

   • Uses Yext Content capacity.
   • Clients will upload their own entities for medical terms (e.g. specialties, conditions, etc) via a file upload. You will have to add fields, link entities, and generally configure their own business logic so that the correct entities are returned for relevant searches.
   • When implementing…
     • We recommend using linked entities so that Find-a-Doc experiences can take advantage of Search features like entity relationships to connect doctors to the conditions they treat, procedures they conduct, etc., which may often appear in search queries.
     • The most important reminder when implementing a custom taxonomy is to employ clear business logic so that the correct entities are returned for relevant searches.

Search Configuration

• For each vertical, apply Phrase Match to all relevant fields that contain healthcare terms. This could include fields from the Yext Healthcare Taxonomy or custom fields containing organization-specific healthcare terms. If you find that this configuration setting is too restrictive (i.e., it is not including desired results in the results set), then consider expanding the result set by adding keyword search in conjunction with Phrase Match to desired fields of the Healthcare Taxonomy.
  

Common Mistakes

• Relying on Synonym Sets as the primary source of healthcare-related taxonomy. Synonym Sets are not intended to replace a fully built Healthcare Taxonomy. They are much more tedious to manage and don’t take advantage of the benefits of Yext Content and the Search algorithms!
• Using keyword search on Healthcare Taxonomy searchable fields as this can prove to generate search results with too much “noise” due to matches on every token (e.g., a query for “back surgery” would provide matches for any provider that has any medical terms including “back” and “surgery”).