ZocDoc helps you book medical appointments faster

Filed under: Internet, Features, Web services, Beta

ZocDoc helps you book medical appointments faster - DLS Interview

by Brad Linder Sep 18th 2007

ZocDoc is launching a limited public beta today. The site lets you search for a doctor or dentist based on location, specialty, and what kind of insurance they accept. It's sort of like OpenTable, but instead of making restaurant reservations you're making making appointments that could be matters of life or death. We guess the same could be true of some restaurants.

At launch, ZocDoc is only available for dentists in New York. Eventually the site plans to add doctors, first in New York and then in other cities. Visitors to the site will be able to vote on which cities they want to add, and the goal is to be in 1 or 2 more cities within the next year and in 8 or more cities within 2 years.

The site is officially launching at TechCrunch40 tomorrow, but we wanted to know why anyone would use the site, so we interviewed CEO Cyrus Massoumi (see the video). He says he's confident ZocDoc will fill the needs of both patients and doctors, and estimates that online medical appointments could become a $15-30 billion industry. We're a bit dubious of those numbers, but when it comes to medical expenses, anything is possible. Patients won't have to pay to use the service. Doctors will.

You can also download the audio of this interview if you'd like or subscribe to our podcast for all our audio interviews. Our Podcast is also available through iTunes.

Tags: appointments, dentist, doctor, insurance, medical, webmd, zocdoc

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

colin_w said 3:54PM on 9-18-2007

Only suitable for US residents. Don't forget this blog is going out worldwide. If it's just for the US say that in the blog.

David Collie said 10:39AM on 9-19-2007

We have a similar service, Appointments Online, for the UK market which is launching in November and is currently in beta. It's free for patient use and practices pay an annual subscription fee to use it. The service is linked in real-time to the appointment systems in use in the practices and has met with very enthusiastic responses from the beta testers.

http://www.informatica-internet.com/appointments-online/overview.html

David Collie said 1:26PM on 9-19-2007

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