Healthcare provider records and provider search setup
Key Takeaway
Search reads synced provider data, not your source records. Choose Provider Search for bed search or advanced search, choose Provider Search with Criteria-Based Search and Filter for result filters or card view, and use both in one org when you need both.
In Agentforce Health, healthcare providers are the practitioners (people) who care for patients and the facilities (organizations) where care happens. You model each provider with records for who it is and what it does, then link practitioners to facilities, specialties, networks, and credentials. Provider Search turns that data into a searchable object, so internal users and Experience Cloud site users can find the right provider by criteria such as location, specialty, and whether the provider is accepting new patients.
Two records for each provider
Each provider gets two kinds of records. One kind says who the provider is, a person or an organization. The other is a Healthcare Provider record, which says what the provider does. The Healthcare Provider record stores business-level details such as the provider type.
Model facilities such as hospitals, clinics, and labs as accounts with a Business record type.
Model practitioners such as doctors, nurses, and physical therapists as person accounts or contacts. Salesforce strongly recommends person accounts, and contacts give only limited capabilities for provider records. Person accounts fit practitioners because many practitioners are independent entities with practicing rights at several locations. A practitioner's unique identifier, such as a National Provider Identifier (NPI), follows them wherever they work.
Model each practitioner with both a person account and a Healthcare Provider record, because together they represent the FHIR Practitioner resource. If you model a provider only as a person account, it isn't aligned to the FHIR Practitioner resource and may not be usable in features such as Provider Search.
The Healthcare Provider record is the base, and it references the person account through its AccountId field. However, if you use Provider Search, you must leave the "Account" field on a practitioner's Healthcare Provider record empty to prevent provider search sync issues. On that record, select the contact that represents the practitioner in the "Practitioner" field.