Patient Engagement Starts with Making Appointments
ZocDoc is a free online service for patients to book doctor and dentist appointments instantly – and we wish more doc offices used it!
ZocDoc’s mission is to improve access to healthcare. The service currently offers patients the ability to book appointments with clinicians in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington DC.
Patients benefit because they can avoid the hassle of waiting on hold, or wondering whether a doctor takes a particular insurance. Participating doctors and dentists benefit by attracting new patients, and alleviating the productivity lost from last minute cancellations by filling those available appointments with ZocDoc patients. (Source)
ZocDoc, a New York-based four-year-old start-up raised $50 million from DST Global last week. DST Global is the investment vehicle of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who had made early bets in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. ZocDoc is its first health-related investment. Milner joins another billionaire investor who’s become a mini-expert, Peter Thiel. His Founders Fund put up $15 million last summer. Others include venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. This brings the amount of money ZocDoc has raised to $70 million, one of the largest in health IT.
ZocDoc’s business is refreshingly simple. Patients can schedule doctor appointments online for free. Doctors pay $250 a month for the service. The key is creating more revenue for the physician; Massoumi says his automated scheduling software is more efficient than a receptionist and most of his clients add at least two new patients per month which makes up for the monthly fee.
“We’re the fastest growing health technology company,” says Massoumi. He won’t disclose the number of doctors signing up, but 700,000 unique patients per month use ZocDoc in 10 cities so far.
Massoumi, a 35-year-old former McKinsey & Co. consultant, co-founded ZocDoc in 2007 with Oliver Kharraz, a neurologist who also worked at McKinsey. Massoumi had flown from Seattle to New York with a bad sinus infection which punctured his ear drum upon landing. It took him four days to find a Ear Nose & Throat doctor through his health insurance web site. He found out that it typically takes 20.5 days to see a new doctor, and that physicians had a 10% to 20% cancellation rate. “I thought there had to be a better way,” he says. If restaurants and airlines could automate booking, why couldn’t doctors? (Source)
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