Provider Search for a Vision Care Administrator

Project overview. Medical Eye Services, a leading administrator of vision care insurance plans commissioned us to design and develop a corporate web site that would enable subscribers to search for an authorized provider in their local area.

Site features. The search feature of the site (mesvision.com) has some interesting elements:

• Upon entering the search section of the site, users are asked to enter their city. The client receives a report each month of the names of all the cities that were entered and the number of times each was entered.
• Search results can be viewed by provider type or alphabetically.
• Users can perform subsequent site searches by provider name, by city or by zip code.
• Users who are not satisfied with the list of providers generated by a search can select "Find More Providers Nearby," and they will be given a list of providers in a wider area.

Interface with in-house system. The provider list for this site is updated daily at the client's site. Rather than establish a costly link between the web hosting facility and the client's database server, we worked with the client's information services department to develop a script that would extract the necessary data from their system and convert it to a format where it could easily be uploaded to the web server on a monthly basis.