Project: “Find a Doctor” Utility Redesign

Fixing the most important feature on the website—by working around the system, not inside it.

📍 The Situation

Thanks to our newly implemented voice-of-the-consumer tool, we discovered a major issue on our site: our “Find a Doctor” utility was broken.

  • Slow load times due to massive, unoptimized data sets

  • Inconsistent results—physicians missing from some searches or showing up in places they didn’t belong

  • Disconnected data across specialties, locations, and conditions

  • Poor UX requiring exact spellings or A–Z browsing (yes, seriously)

For patients, this meant frustration. For the health system, it meant missed connections with the very people we were trying to serve.

🛠 My Role

I led the strategic and UX effort on this project, working closely with:

  • A senior developer

  • A SOLR search consultancy based in D.C.

  • Internal IT and data governance teams (when we could get them)

We knew the core issue wasn’t just bad design—it was bad, scattered data. And no one wanted to fix their upstream systems. So we decided to build around them.

🧱 The Approach

We did what most health systems wouldn’t:
We looked beyond healthcare.

We studied:

  • Every major find-a-doc tool in the industry (none nailed it)

  • E-commerce search experiences from Amazon, Zappos, and other high-volume systems

  • Emerging best practices in faceted search, error tolerance, and filter UX

And then we built a headless architecture that made it all work.

🧠 The Solution

  • Custom Angular front end built to feel instantaneous and intuitive

  • Middle-layer data scrubber that cleaned and reconciled physician data before passing it to the search engine

  • SOLR-powered smart search that tolerated misspellings, surfaced more relevant results, and connected specialties to real-world patient queries

  • Unified filters by name, condition, keyword, and location—all live, all responsive

  • Infinite scroll (no pagination), with real-time filter logic that never left users confused or stranded

  • Clean new card layout for physicians—faster visual scans, clearer CTAs, and better mobile performance

This was years ahead of what most systems were offering. In fact, the Cleveland Clinic launched a nearly identical UI just weeks before ours—confirming we were on the cutting edge.

📊 Results

  • 18% increase in successful physician searches

  • 12% boost in patient satisfaction scores

  • Drastic improvement in site speed, UX clarity, and cross-departmental linking

  • Created a scalable, supportable model that reduced reliance on brittle legacy systems

🪞 Looking Back

This project proved that you don’t need perfect systems—you need a smart interface layer. By isolating the chaos and creating a controlled handoff point, we delivered a smooth, fast, and user-centered experience that patients actually wanted to use.

And while the search felt seamless to users, it only worked because we refused to let internal data complexity define the experience.