Healthcare organizations are under pressure to transform due to shifting patient expectations. In a world of Amazon Prime, DoorDash, and Airbnb, healthcare consumers now expect the same ease, personalization, and immediacy when booking care.
It’s no longer enough to simply offer an online provider directory and contact number. The best healthcare websites provide a digital front door into a tailored, trust-building Find Care experience that’s as intuitive as the best ecommerce journey. And those who succeed will fill schedules, optimize operations, and build long-term relationships.
“Our research reveals a fundamental shift: 45% of working-age consumers now prioritize digital-first healthcare over traditional office visits,” said Tara Becker, Principal Healthcare and Life Sciences at Perficient. “More critically, 30% are willing to change providers entirely when faced with friction in their healthcare journey.”
At a recent Coveo webinar, Becker and Mike Raley, VP of Marketing at Coveo, underscored that these findings didn’t indicate a trend — it’s a consumer mandate.
What Is a Find Care Experience, and Why Should a Healthcare Website Offer One?
So, what exactly is ‘Find Care’? It’s a digital experience that enables patients to discover, connect with, and schedule healthcare appointments online according to their specific preferences, including location, language requirements, provider gender, availability and other relevant information.
It’s about providing more than good consumer experience to prospective patients — it has a domino effect on the rest of the healthcare journey.
Perficient’s research also revealed that 41% of consumers indicated they would change providers altogether if the digital experience didn’t meet their expectations. When patients find healthcare websites difficult to navigate, they’ll go elsewhere — which can hurt healthcare providers in multiple ways.
Impacts to Patient Acquisition
Poor digital experiences can instantly negate a healthcare provider’s marketing efforts, causing potential patients to abandon their care journey before it begins.
“If the information exists but can’t be found when site visitors need it, the value of that information drops to zero,” said Raley.
“If you think about the millions of dollars that many healthcare organizations are spending on patient acquisition — billboards, advertising on TV, campaigns, SEO, et cetera — to get a person to your site, and then not deliver something that should be available to them, that’s a difficult situation to be in.”
A Find Care experience is about linking the journey from one channel to the next. And it doesn’t stop at a patient completing an online booking, which we’ll dive further into below.
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Impacts to Revenue & Operational Efficiency
Patient bookings have a direct impact on revenue. After all, increased appointment completions generate earnings, and visits stem from bookings.
Online booking delivers a double advantage: healthcare organizations can optimize staffing and reduce costs while offering patients self-service options. This also relieves overwhelmed call center staff, which Becker, with 15 years of transformation experience at Mass General Hospital, described as already stretched beyond capacity.
While Becker acknowledged that many providers are hesitant to make the leap to online booking, she emphasized that the focus should be on enabling booking where appropriate.
“Online booking isn’t right for every service — cancer care requires a more personalized, high-touch approach,” she said. “But for straightforward appointments like primary care and family medicine, providers should offer online scheduling and use virtual agents to improve the entire patient experience.”
Impacts to Patient Outcomes
Last but certainly not least, a disconnected digital healthcare journey has the potential to hurt patient outcomes. Perficient’s research found that 23% of research participants indicated they felt friction in their scheduling experience led to adverse outcomes.
“We’re talking about easing access to care,” Becker said. “Ultimately, we want patients to achieve better health outcomes — to feel well and get the care they need when they need it.”
She acknowledged the complexity of enabling online booking for patients.
“I get it — some doctors are hesitant to open their schedules online, but it’s becoming table stakes,” Becker explained. “The ‘Find Care’ experience is your front door — it drives patient acquisition, builds trust and loyalty, and ultimately improves health outcomes.”
The Strategy: How to Create a Find Care Experience
The sign of an effective Find Care experience is one that feels benevolent and easy, according to Becker. And achieving that empathetic connection starts with strategy. As Becker put it: “Start with your North Star. What are your priority service lines? Who are the target audiences for those service lines, and what are their needs?”
Understanding and identifying these groups helps outline the unique patient journeys and the underlying technology needed to support them.
The webinar provided a blueprint, with best practices and core steps:
- Define the funnel: From awareness to booking, map the patient journey. Use omnichannel promotion — email, search, ads, social — to drive top-of-funnel engagement.
- Design intuitive entry points: Don’t bury Find Care behind menus. Make it a front-and-center CTA.
- Offer guided pathways: From quick booking for general care to exploratory journeys for complex diagnoses, serve patients based on their needs.
- Unify and personalize content: Pull in data and content from across your ecosystem — EHRs, CRMs, knowledge bases — so patients can discover relevant answers in real time.
- Optimize continuously: Like any good commerce platform, iterate based on search behavior, engagement analytics, and outcomes.
A Find Care Case Study in Progress
A midwestern regional healthcare system exemplifies digital transformation in action. While still on their journey, they’ve made significant progress by partnering with Perficient to redesign their website, find care journey and enable online appointment booking for prospective patients.
“Before, patients would rave about their care but complain about the digital experience,” Becker noted. “We set out to close that gap and make the digital journey as exceptional as their clinical care.”
The Starting Point: Disconnected and Difficult
The hospital’s digital presence was fragmented. Navigation was poor, content lived in silos, and patients had to work far too hard to find care. Even for those familiar with the system, booking a simple appointment often required a phone call and multiple touchpoints.
“They knew they had an excellent clinical experience,” Becker shared, “but their website didn’t reflect that. It was harming their reputation and hurting conversion.”
How Coveo Supports the Solution
Perficient partnered with Coveo to power a modern, AI-driven Find Care experience that could deliver on the demands of today’s digitally savvy healthcare consumers. At the heart of this transformation is Coveo’s unmatched ability to unify disconnected systems and apply AI to content discovery in a way that enhances relevance — without data migration or disrupting existing infrastructure.
Alt text: A graphic visualizes a unified index.
In most health systems, critical patient-facing information is scattered across multiple platforms: EHRs, CMSs and DXPs, CRMs , separate tools for knowledge bases, and others for provider directories or location services. These silos contribute to a fragmented digital experience where patients are forced to hunt for care, switch systems, or call for support — adding friction at every turn.
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Unifying the Experience
Coveo solves this fragmentation by acting as a connective layer across all these systems. No re-platforming. No data migration. Just real-time orchestration of content and data to deliver a seamless search and discovery journey.
Specifically, the solution helps the health system:
- Connect disparate content sources: EHR, CMS/DXP, CRM, knowledge bases, provider directories, and more — Coveo integrates with all of them to power a single source of digital truth. This connectivity means patients don’t experience the back-end complexity; they experience clarity.
- Unify the search journey: From “find a cardiologist near me” to “show only cardiac providers who speak Spanish and are accepting new patients,” every query routes through a unified experience. It spans providers, services, FAQs, and content — delivering continuity no matter where or how a patient starts their journey.
- Use AI to surface the most relevant results: Coveo applies AI to search. It’s about improving the digital pathway. It understands user behavior, urgency, and context to deliver the most relevant answers — reducing bounce, increasing conversion, and guiding patients efficiently to care.
This is where the “search box” becomes what Coveo calls the intent box. It’s not just about typing in keywords. It’s about surfacing what each individual actually needs — right now. The intent box intelligently interprets every query and matches it with the most relevant path forward, based on real-time data and patient behavior.
“Coveo can access information from all of these systems to serve up the right content at the right time,” Becker explained. This not only lightens the load for call centers and staff but also empowers patients with clarity, confidence, and control.
The result? A digital experience that feels less like a maze and more like a guide.
Where Their Transformation Is Today
The midwestern healthcare provider’s digital transformation is well underway, with improved continuity and coherence across the experience.
And that coherence is powered by the underlying AI-relevance technology, which enables them to guide patients to the right care — using filters like location, gender, languages spoken, availability, and insurance compatibility — all without switching systems or calling for help.
Using AI-powered search functions like query suggest, location-aware search, and Dynamic Navigation Experience, the hospital’s website is able to serve information to patients in a way that’s relevant and meaningful, ultimately resulting in scheduling an appointment. Booking functionality has been fully integrated, particularly for primary care — achieving the goal of making an online appointment in just one or two clicks.
“They’re seeing improvements in search, in engagement, and in satisfaction,” said Becker. “But more importantly, they’ve built the foundation for something that can scale.”
What’s Next: Toward an Agentic Experience
The next evolution? Making the Find Care experience not just intelligent, but also agentic.
This means AI that doesn’t just respond but acts on behalf of patients. Think of it as a digital concierge: guiding, advising, anticipating needs, and offering proactive support.
“As we move forward,” said Becker, “we’re looking at how the experience becomes even more personalized, more anticipatory. This is about creating a journey that adapts in real time, not just based on what a patient does, but what they need next”.
Building the Future of Healthcare, One Search at a Time
In an era where patient expectations are rising and digital access is make-or-break, healthcare organizations can’t afford to treat Find Care as an afterthought. It’s not just about adding a search bar or enabling online bookings — it’s about transforming the entire journey from friction to flow.
The midwestern healthcare provider’s journey shows what’s possible when digital experience is treated as a strategic priority. With the right technology, partners, and approach, even a fragmented system can evolve into a coherent, scalable, and patient-centered platform — one that reflects the quality of care patients already trust.
Find Care isn’t just a function. It’s the front door to your brand, your outcomes, and your future growth. And now, it’s a competitive differentiator. If you’re ready to learn what makes a Find Care experience truly work — and how to build your own — watch the full webinar, “Find Care, Build Trust: Using AI to Guide Healthcare Consumers.”
You’ll get the blueprint, real-world lessons, and next steps to take your digital experience from good to game-changing.