title: A fuzzy-match search engine for physician directories.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  A search engine to find physicians' information is a basic but crucial function of a health care provider's website. Inefficient search engines, which return no results or incorrect results, can lead to patient frustration and potential customer loss. A search engine that can handle misspellings and spelling variations of names is needed, as the United States (US) has culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse names.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The Marshfield Clinic website provides a search engine for users to search for physicians' names. The current search engine provides an auto-completion function, but it requires an exact match. We observed that 26% of all searches yielded no results. The goal was to design a fuzzy-match algorithm to aid users in finding physicians easier and faster.
  
  
  METHODS
  Instead of an exact match search, we used a fuzzy algorithm to find similar matches for searched terms. In the algorithm, we solved three types of search engine failures: "Typographic", "Phonetic spelling variation", and "Nickname". To solve these mismatches, we used a customized Levenshtein distance calculation that incorporated Soundex coding and a lookup table of nicknames derived from US census data.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using the "Challenge Data Set of Marshfield Physician Names," we evaluated the accuracy of fuzzy-match engine-top ten (90%) and compared it with exact match (0%), Soundex (24%), Levenshtein distance (59%), and fuzzy-match engine-top one (71%).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We designed, created a reference implementation, and evaluated a fuzzy-match search engine for physician directories. The open-source code is available at the codeplex website and a reference implementation is available for demonstration at the datamarsh website.
authors.affiliation: Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Biomedical Informatics Research Center, Marshfield, WI, United States.
authors.forename: Majid
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6962-3554
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rastegar-Mojarad
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8748-249X
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kadolph
authors.forename: Zhan
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0426-0382
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2005-7819
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wall
authors.forename: Narayana
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0099-5330
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Murali
authors.forename: Simon
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2876-2042
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lin
keywords: Fuzzy-Match; Levenshtein Distance; Physician Directory; Physician Name