“We needed an efficient way to build key pages like Find a Doctor, Find Clinical Trials and Find a Location; SearchStax allowed us to easily build those pages off of indexes, using relevancy and results modeling to guarantee that users have a great experience and find the location or service they need.”
Nicholas Lauritzen
Programmer - Lead, Web Application Development
The University of Chicago Medicine has been at the forefront of medicine since 1927, with its three-part mission of medical education, research and patient care at the core of its operations. As one of the nation’s leading academic medical institutions, UChicago Medicine unites five medical organizations: Pritzker School of Medicine, Biological Sciences Division, Medical Center, Community Health and Hospital Division, and UChicago Medicine Physicians.
The institutions serve over 626,000 residents in 28 neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side and over 250,000 residents across 13 ZIP codes in the south suburbs, making essential and highly specialized medical services available to their local communities.
With this vast network of doctors, locations and services at hand, UChicago Medicine’s website plays a key role in connecting patients with the information and scheduling services they need.
UChicago Medicine had previously developed a custom search engine for their website. They were facing issues with scalability and managing the Solr index, which was time intensive and costly for the development team.
In addition, the marketing team needed more freedom and agility to update search results without requiring any code changes by the developers.
These business needs aligned with a larger project to migrate their website to a new version of Sitecore and created an opportunity for the UChicago Medicine team to explore options for upgrading their website search experience.
UChicago Medicine implemented both SearchStax Managed Search service and Site Search solution as they embarked on their Sitecore migration project.
Managed Search lightened the manual lift for the development team of managing their Solr infrastructure and gave them a stable and resilient platform for their Sitecore implementation. In evaluating options, SearchStax Site Search put more power and analytics data directly in the hands of their marketing team to improve the search experience for users.
The search phase of their site migration project was completed in less than 4 months. As part of their implementation, the team developed new search capabilities that included: Find a Doctor, Find a Location and Conditions and Services.
The Find a Doctor and Find a Location features use geo-location functionality that lets users view results in list view or map view – and user filters to refine the search results. These search pages are essential functions for their website users to quickly find the information they need and easily schedule appointments with medical professionals or get directions to specific locations.
UChicago Medicine significantly cut down their development time and costs, while avoiding a ground-up building process that would’ve been required without SearchStax.
The marketing team is now self-sufficient in managing search results with the ability to promote items, delist less relevant pages and make all search-related adjustments without the need for code changes. They now have full visibility into what users are searching for and content gaps that arise when searches don’t yield results, which allows them to develop content based on their users’ direct needs.
In addition, the updates give visitors faster search speed, more relevant and reliable results and more ways to find doctors, locations and services.
Managed Search, Site Search
Sitecore
North America
Higher Education
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