Hospitals get an Rx with search

Herman Baumann, executive director of strategic development of the American Hospital Association (AHA), found search when he sought to gain greater control of his sprawling organization.

The AHA, a national nonprofit service organization that acts as a clearinghouse for almost 5,000 hospitals, health care systems, networks, and other health care providers as well as 37,000 individual members, had more content than it knew how to handle. Like many organizations, the AHA looked to search technology to better organize itself and gain strategic advantage.

“We had 72 Web sites on 18 platforms, and our members had the challenge of visiting each site and in most cases browsing, so it was a lot harder for them to access information,” Baumann says. “Our solution was to link everything with a common search engine.”

In February 2003, the AHA deployed a unified platform that uses search vendor Verity’s K2 Catalog software as a central feature of its new HospitalConnect portal.

The product’s search features include full-text search and parametric selection to allow users to quickly find sought-after structured and unstructured content from different content repositories.

A classification feature helps AHA to organize thousands of documents into taxonomies. These documents include everything from medical best practices and regulatory information to product information. Health care professionals can thus obtain more precise search results by limited queries.

Another feature indexes content from HospitalConnect’s 50 Web sites that serve health care providers, so when users submit the query against those indexes, the results are presented in one search result list.

Enterprises that push the envelope with innovative uses of search technology help stretch the meaning of the term itself. Search technology is now utilized for an increasing number of applications. For example, “Verity is a juggernaut because their platform can be put to so many uses,” says Matthew Berk, research director at Jupiter Research.

“The underlying algorithms and language-processing tools are really multifunctional,” says Rob Lancasteri, senior analyst at The Yankee Group. “You provide search technology and you can build multiple applications off of that.”

At People’s Bank in Bridgeport, Conn., Information Architect Ross Jenkins is using Mondosoft’s search and analysis tools for strategic advantage.

The Mondosoft software examines customers’ search activity and behavior data to reach a better understanding of visitors’ behavior and their on-line experiences. The bank could recognize user trends and come up with an action plan in response.

“We can see results,” Jenkins says, pointing to a 65 percent increase in successful searches in the site.