The Temple University Hospital System Find a Doctor site was a physician search platform built as a custom Drupal theme, completed while consulting with Eastern Standard. The site served as a network-wide search tool for patients looking to find a physician across Temple Health, which includes the main Temple University Hospital, the Heart and Vascular Institute, the Lung Center, and Fox Chase Cancer Center.
The search platform's core functionality centered on a proximity-based physician locator. Patients searching for a doctor typically start with their location and specialty need, so the search system was built around location-based proximity queries — returning physicians sorted by distance from the user's input location. Filters for physician attributes including gender, specialty, and practice location allowed users to narrow results to match their specific preferences.
A technically significant component was the bidirectional feed system connecting the Find a Doctor site with the existing anchor sites for Temple Lung, Temple Heart and Vascular Institute, and Fox Chase Cancer Center. Import feeds brought physician data from the specialty sites into the Find a Doctor index, ensuring the network-wide search reflected the full physician roster. Export feeds pushed data back to the specialty sites, maintaining consistency without requiring manual duplication of physician records across multiple properties.
This kind of multi-directional data integration across a health system's web portfolio requires careful data modeling — physician records need to be normalized consistently, updates need to propagate correctly between systems, and specialty-site presentations of physician data need to stay accurate without creating independent maintenance overhead for each site.
