more: Healthcare Sourcing Techniques

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In sync with the times, I want to share some Healthcare sourcing tips to implement in addition to what you are already doing.

I know that sourcing for Healthcare professionals is challenging from experience. Last year, I ran a project sourcing for (bedside) Registered Nurses with 2-3 years of experience for a hospital in Texas. While LinkedIn is a site that can verify the length of experience, it produced a ridiculously small outcome: 200 RNs out of tens of thousands RNs who live in Texas.

However, the industry has its advantages in terms of finding info online, including:

  • There are searchable databases
  • Hospital websites have bios and contact lists
  • Hospital websites have “structure” for filtered search via Custom Search Engines

Sites, where you can search for doctors and nurses, include doximity.com, healthgrades.com, vitals.com, and zocdoc.com (Google these together and you will find more). Physicians’ profiles usually have degrees, licenses, specialization, education, affiliation, address, phone number, and ranking. Some profiles have more info, including email or gender. However, searching within the sites is limited.

Luckily, these sites have public profiles, which we can X-Ray, for example, like this:

site:doximity.com/pub gastroenterology intitle:”San Francisco”.

Examine profile titles and URLs for each site to see if it’s possible to search for specific values such as specialty with inurl: or intitle:, like I did in the example.

And we can do even better using Custom Search Engines (CSEs). I used to work with doctors back when I was a Software Developer and have found them to be “computer-unfriendly”. So I was surprised to discover that healthcare-related sites like the ones above, as well as websites of hospitals, are rich with structured Schema.org-based information, which we can query. (Hospitals may have strong IT staff or use some standard hospital website-building tools, I don’t know.)

Schema.org provides healthcare webmasters with many Objects such as Hospital, Physician, and MedicalOrganization. Now, if you are prepared to deal with gibberish-sounding “more:p:” search operators, you can take advantage of searching for Objects’ values. If you are not, sorry! Please read some other posts.

In the following examples, I will be using the CSE Search Everything, which has no restrictions. (The reason to use a CSE vs. Google.com is that only CSEs support operators to query pages’ structure.) You can modify each of the links below to serve your needs.

Physician search across sites:

more:p:physician plastic surgeon cleveland.

If you start seeing many results from one particular site in searches like the above (which is likely to happen), you may want to X-Ray that site alone and also search excluding the site.

Search for Physicians by specialty (add your keywords):

more:p:physician-medicalspecialty:dermatology.

Search for keywords in description:

more:p:physician-description:ear*nose*throat

(The Asterisk * serves as an AND operator).

Search for hospitals by name:

more:p:hospital-name:saint*mary

Whoever worked on creating Schema Objects had a weakness for all things medical:

There is even an Object for Medicalwebpage. There is lots to explore.

Among general search sites, Doximity provides especially rich structure to query:

Our tool Social List has Agents for Doximity and Healthgrades, allowing you to search without writing out operators and export results in Excel.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments 1

  1. Could you recommend a site, or sites for finding Pharmacy Techs in Massachusetts? I’m also in need of a good search string !

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