A roadmap for designing a personalized search tool for individual healthcare providers.

Each year, a large percentage of people change their physicians and other individual healthcare providers (IHPs). Many of these people have difficulty identifying a replacement they like. To help people find satisfactory IHPs who are likely to be good at managing their health issues and serve their needs well, in a previous paper we proposed a high-level framework for building a personalized search tool for IHPs. There are many issues regarding designing a personalized search tool for IHPs, of which only a small portion are mentioned in our previous paper. This paper surveys various such issues that are not covered in our previous paper. We include some preliminary thoughts on how to address these issues with the hope to stimulate future research work on the new topic of personalized search for IHPs.