UMHS Optimizes Drupal Search with
RechercheStax for their Find-a-Doctor App

Le University of Michigan’s Health System (UMHS) understands that patients need to be matched to the ideal provider. Finding a physician with the right skills, experience, and availability takes careful technical implementation.

UMHS needed a robust search solution for their Find-a-Doctor feature for their website which was based on the Drupal CMS. The solution needed to be highly available and performant under high load and malleable from a relevance perspective so that search results could be tuned to how their users were searching.

With search in particular, doctors generally don’t use the same language as consumers. Patients have “heart attacks” while doctors term them “myocardial infarctions.” Mapping the terminology between patients and experts is a key part of the search experience. Since UMHS’s platform of choice is Drupal et Apache Solr is the recommended search engine for Drupal, they needed to find the best way to deploy and manage Solr on Drupal.

UMHS’s staff knew that directly searching the data in Drupal tends to deliver mediocre search results, plus the Drupal search API doesn’t allow for customizations needed to optimize the search experience. They also didn’t want the headaches from standing up and managing their own servers.