Provider Search

Discovery

My team regularly reviews advocates taking live calls with members. On several calls, members were trying to find a new PCP and weren't able to find them on the external Florida Blue website. We watched the internal advocate try to help — and ultimately resort to Google to find the information. On a more personal note: I had recently become a full-time employee and went through the same frustrating process myself.

The existing OPD Directory required a user to select a plan and 5 additional drop-downs before a single result could appear. For this redesign to succeed, we needed to influence external teams to revamp the backend architecture entirely.

I partnered with the Customer Experience team to develop prototypes that became the catalyst for change across the enterprise. Since internal advocate needs mirrored external user needs, we started with side-by-side evaluations and extensive competitive analysis.

Research

What we needed was a "fuzzy search" — instant feedback from the backend as you type, from a single input field. Within the Contact domain, we rewrote the search database using Redis Search, which cached results to deliver both performance and optimal user experience.

Over two years, we brought advanced concepts to life — searching by condition, provider specialty, facility name, or NPI number, all from one field. Additional problems solved:

• Out-of-network search — search without a plan selected, for members whose physician had moved networks
• Accepting new patients — aligned data between source systems that previously had no reliable indicator
• Google Maps integration — gave advocates and members spatial context that text lists alone couldn't provide

Testing & Prototyping

On top of the core search experience, we integrated additional features to stay in sync with the enterprise Find Care journey. A fuzzy autocomplete surfaces conditions, specialties, and individual provider names in real time as you type — dramatically reducing the time needed to start a meaningful search.

We also built an Amazon-esque faceted filtering system allowing users to progressively narrow results — by specialty, network status, language, and more — until they find exactly the right provider. Users can even email the filtered results directly to the member.

The entire CustomerConnect platform is a multi-tenant application serving Florida Blue, Florida Blue Medicare, Truli for Health, and FHCP from a single codebase. Delivering three major feature upgrades based directly on user feedback — and building a search experience from the ground up that serves four separate entities — is a testament to what a lean, agile team can accomplish when users are at the center of every decision.