Healthcare marketplace search

Someone types "chest pain when I climb stairs". Keyword search finds nothing useful, because no cardiologist profile contains that sentence. Pure semantic search does better on the phrasing but becomes unreliable the moment a query contains an exact clinical term like a named procedure.

Both failure modes are real and they pull in opposite directions, so the answer is to run both and fuse the scores, with a medical terminology layer expanding symptoms, aliases and abbreviations before either channel sees the query.

The vocabulary is the product

A hand-built terminology map covering specialties, symptoms and aliases does more for result quality than any embedding model choice. It is unglamorous, domain-specific work, and it is the part that cannot be bought off a shelf.

Fuse, do not choose

Picking keyword or semantic means accepting one of two failure modes. Running both and merging costs a few milliseconds and removes the choice entirely.

Suggestions where confidence is low

When a query matches weakly, the honest response is a prompt toward better terms rather than a confident list of loosely related doctors. In healthcare specifically, a wrong confident answer is worse than an admitted gap.