Filtering/Ranking

Overview

Does the search parameter you're looking for not exist? Maybe you want to return only Spanish-speaking providers and Ribbon doesn't expose an easy filter parameter for that use case.

Or do you want to the search results to be ranked by something other than address? Perhaps you'd like to see the highest confidence providers at the top while keeping lower confidence ones at the bottom of the search results.

Where Ribbon's core search parameters don't fit your use case, there are two ways you can modify the search results from Ribbon's API, custom filters and boost filters. The correct filter to use depends on whether you want to completely remove 'less relevant' search results or push them to the bottom of search results.

Custom Filters

Ribbon's custom filters only return relevant search results while removing providers that don’t pass the filter criteria. We recommend using custom filters when the filtered results aren't at all relevant to navigating patients to care. Many of Ribbon's provider/location search parameters act as filters, so check if there's a default parameter you can use before creating a custom filter!

Boost Filters (Ranking)

For most of our standard filters and custom filters, providers or locations that don't match our search query won't appear in the returned results. However, these non-matching providers/locations may still be relevant to the user! Boost Filters are a type of filter_type which "boosts" providers or locations that match our search query to the top of our results while keeping non-matching yet potentially relevant options near the bottom of our results. This can be useful where it's important to still return results where coverage can be low in a specific geography/specialty.