University of Cincinnati Physicians

The University of Cincinnati Physicians’ marketing department approached us asking for help with a conversion and rebranding of their previous website. As we discussed the existing site, in addition to the branding change and a content refresh, it turned out that physician searching and physician profiles were an area that were in need of significant help. UC Physicians needed a much more full-featured and intelligent search engine for browsing through physicians, and they were not opposed to investing some of their own man hours into doing data entry.

We delivered a two-part solution. Part one was a C#-driven data storage and search engine system. This system first imported all of the data from their old system and transformed it for use in the new system. It then allowed, on an ongoing basis, for the marketing team to update and maintain many different fields of profile information for each system. It allowed the team to assign specialties to physicians and to weight the specialties. This system’s search engine included an advanced prioritization algorithm to sort search results based on a number of different criteria. All of these features were exposed to the main site and to other UC Health sites through use of SOAP-based web services.

The second part of the solution was a custom WordPress site. This site included all the static content pages and also included several custom plug-ins to interface with the web service and provide search and physician profile services within the site. Results were a large increase in usage of physician searching and a traffic surge surrounding the site launch.