Geisinger Health Lead The Way Following Overwhelming Success of Innovative Search Tool

The events of this year haven’t been kind to all healthcare providers, as our story on the Revint Solutions’ patient access platform sale shows. It has very much been a year for those struggling to be as creative in their approach as possible.

Following a switch in focus and function, Geisinger Health has been an example of this. It has seen a boost of organic traffic to their site by thirty percent. The healthcare provider has taken on concerns of the consumer and brought them the tech to fit with exactly what they need.

Using its innovative search tool, the company has boosted both its reputation and, as or more importantly, the experience of their clients. There is no doubt that many within this sector will be looking to deliver the same results going forward.

What The Healthcare Provider Does For Its Customers

Operating across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Geisinger provides a service for over three million people across forty-five counties. The service hires one thousand nine hundred physicians and is also affiliated with seventeen hundred physicians.

The goal of Geisinger is to get its customers to the right service based on their needs. The company is recognized throughout the industry for delivering high-quality care at low cost, using an integrated model of healthcare.

The Need For An Innovative Search Tool

The problem the company faced was that customers were not able to find the specific specialist they needed, effortlessly, and efficiently. To combat this, Geisinger recognized the need for a more innovative search tool.

Sarah Sommer, vice president of digital engagement at Geisinger, understood that there was a growing requirement for more precise results:

“We wanted to empower our providers and operations leaders to be able to login and curate their clinical keywords and profiles, increasing the odds that consumers who directly search for care would be able to refine results to the right providers for their individual needs.”

However, having or using the right search tool is not that simple. As we covered in this piece here about Tulane’s findings earlier in the year, clear discrimination has an impact on searches and their results and scheduling too.

Bringing The Perfect Results To Customers

Ultimately these problems meant that the search had to bring highly specific results regarding specialists, locations, and experience. Sommer went on to say that

“We also needed a solution where providers could enter additional information outside of their credentialing details, such as professional memberships and personal interests – to inform personal statements – that would be routed to marketing for editing and publishing.”

Working With Kyruus To Solve The Problem

Geisinger eventually decided to work with Kyruus, a specialist in the search and scheduling systems industry. The goal was to offer customers the highest standard of results they could find and to provide in-depth analytics which Geisinger could then use.

The result was ProvideMatch and ProvideMatch Administrator, the former for customers, the latter for providers. These two packages would give providers the chance to have their own say on their profiles and their specific keywords, a novel concept:

“We wanted to empower our providers and operations leaders to be able to log in and manage their clinical keywords and profiles themselves over time.”

The result was a perfect meeting of supply and demand which many healthcare providers could only dream about.

Community Based Approach

When you dig deeper into the nitty-gritty of what Geisinger has done, it makes perfect sense that it has found the success that it has. This has very much been a community-based approach that has called on providers, specialists, and leadership to reach the end goal.

Sommer speaks about their use of specialists in this process:

“We asked leadership to appoint one leader from more than 80 specialties to define and approve a default clinical template for all providers in their specialties.”

This is so often the part of the process which is omitted, the involvement of the key stakeholders who the new software will be aiming to support and help.

“After all 80-plus specialty leaders approved their default terms, we then invited all providers who are schedulable within those specialties to log in to their individual profiles and further refine their clinical terms to reflect the approved scope of practice based on access guidelines.”

The Success Which Came After The Process  Was Completed

As mentioned above, the innovative search tool saw organic search traffic on the site increase by almost thirty percent. Furthermore, the provider data accuracy has also increased by around the thirty percent mark. In real terms, this means more customers being directed to exactly where they needed to go and more specialist providers receiving the right patients.

This innovative search tool looks set to only go from strength to strength as it uses the metrics gathered to further improve the service.