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Dr. Art Papier, MD, observed that when patients came into emergency rooms with visual cues such as rashes or lesions, ER doctors often had trouble diagnosing their complaints. When stumped, doctors use search engines or books. The existing resources are designed to look-up by disease name such as "poison ivy." "How do you search by disease name if you do not know what the patient has?" asks Papier, adding, "What was really needed is the ability to search by patient symptoms, other textual clues and visual features."
To solve this problem, Papier, who is Chief Scientific Officer, and his team developed VisualDx, a tool that enables physicians to search a vast library of images by combining visual and textual clues. He describes VisualDx as a way to "help healthcare providers understand what they're looking at." Rather than having separate databases for each specialty, he says, "we are perfecting search to solve recognition and diagnosis across healthcare." The product is now in more than 450 hospitals in 11 countries.
To build on this initial success, the team developed a consumer version called VisualDxHealth.com. It combines the library of images with a custom search built on top of the Google AJAX Search API. Instead of crawling the entire web and returning search results as the standard Google search does, VisualDxHealth search returns results from just a few trusted sources. Results are grouped by category in tabs: General, Disease Overview, Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment Options. This helps patients discover more about possible conditions quickly and effectively.
"Building our custom search on top of the Google AJAX Search API was great for us. It really improved the signal to noise ratio for the information out there," says James Kieliszek, lead software developer for the search tool. The customers agreed - the percent of return visitors grew from 3.75% shortly after launch to 7.6% after making the custom search prominent on the site. The site's stickiness also improved, with individuals using the search staying 21% longer on the site than those who didn't.
By using the Google AJAX Search API, the team also reduced its development time, effort and other resources significantly. "James' work was much enhanced, and the time it took him to do this was much less, because of the design of the API, and the fact that a custom search engine was already there," notes Bill Haake, VP of Engineering. And because the Google AJAX Search API comes with a template for easy creation of custom search engines (CSE), he continues, "The cost to do this was greatly reduced." The prototype was built in a single day, and the code for the custom engine was created in about a week. Three months later, after iteration and improvements based on feedback, and the search engine was complete - a feat that would have otherwise been more likely to take six months.
About Google AJAX Search API
The Google AJAX Search API lets you put Google Search in your web pages with JavaScript. You can embed a simple, dynamic search box and display search results in your own web pages or use the results in innovative, programmatic ways. For more information visit http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/.
"We draw people in with our medical images and information, but having this search on our site keeps them coming back."
Rory Burrill
Manager of the visualdxhealth.com project