In the hospital, I sometimes need to look up the proper spelling of a physician’s name, or their New York State license number. The state offers a search interface, but it is finicky about commas, and doesn’t have a very pretty display. The search works the way these things did 10 or 15 years ago – hit a Submit button and wait for a new page to render with the results. For my own use (and because I love coding!) I built an Ajax wrapper on the License Search interface.
The page is built using Yahoo! UI components, specifically AutoComplete and DataTable. Due to cross-domain security issues the incoming data must originate from this domain, so I wrote a script that POSTs the name query to the New York State website and returns the results as a JSON set. The YUI code on the page does asynchronous queries to this script as characters are typed into the autocomplete field.
There is no nationwide directory of physician license numbers, but I provided a link to DocFinder, which has a comprehensive database from several states, and individual links to those states whose databases are not included.
Image Credit: sixesandsevens at Flickr
Tags: ajax · license · license search · mashup · New York · yuiNo Comments
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