New York-based medical appointment scheduling service ZocDoc is expanding its offering today. When the company launched last year, users could make appointments with a few dozen dentists in New York city. This week, ZocDoc is adding primary care physicians in Manhattan to the mix.

The service is designed as an alternative for patients who would normally go to their medical insurance provider's web site to find a doctor. That process can be complicated and you don't end up with much useful information about a doctor. ZocDoc includes an easy to use scheduling feature and an user feedback from patients who have previously seen a doctor.

Because most doctors and dentists have unfilled appointments or cancellations throughout the day, ZocDoc makes it easy to schedule last minute appointments without calling a dozen doctor's offices first.

ZocDoc is still limited to New York only, and there are a relatively small number of doctors and dentists signed up. But when we tried out the service for ourselves a few months back, we had no trouble finding an appointment with a nearby dentist on short notice. The company does have plans to expand the service to other markets in time.

Google will launch its online consumer health service early next year. We've known that both Google and Microsoft were working on health related services for a while now. But Microsoft beat Google to the punch, launching its HealthVault portal earlier this month.

So what can we expect from Google Health? Google search chief Marissa Mayer says odds are if you're searching for health information online you're already using Google. The company hopes to leverage its search and data organization technology to help patients maintain their personal health information.

Google Health lets patients store personal medical records, search for health information, manage diet and other health information, and even find local doctors. The service will also have tools that allow doctors to better manage their information, and we assume, share that info with their patients.

But this raises an interesting question. Are doctors going to want to sign up for Microsoft, Google, ZocDoc, and other online services just to communicate with their patients? It seems more likely that an individual doctor or medical practice will pick one service and then stick with it.

For example, if you take your kid to Fluffy Bunny pediatrics, you'll find that the doctors are willing to share all of your child's medical records with you over Microsoft HealthVault. If you sign up for Google Health, you'll have to get old-fashioned paper records. Because otherwise, Fluffy Bunny doctors would have to spend time submitting all of their documents to 2 or more different sites, which would increase their workload, not decrease it. This, of course would force health consumers to sign up for multiple services if they want to make sure they have access to the latest information from all of their doctors, meaning that you're the one with a disorganized mess, not your doctor.

So while we like the idea of having a single online location to conduct all of your health-related searches, store all of your medical records, and keep your doctor and family up to date, we're just not sure there's room for multiple competing services in this market.

Microsoft has launched its new consumer health portal which is something of a cross between WebMD and Life Record. In other words, HealthVault both lets you search for general health related information and store your own personal health data online.

What does a software company know about medicine? Well, Microsoft has partnered with groups ranging from the American Heart Association to the Mayo Clinic. When you search for a disease, symptoms, or pretty much anything else you'll get results from those institutions, Wikipedia, the web, and sponsors. If you sign up for an account, you can also save results in a 'scrapbook."

As for your personal date, that will be stored in an encrypted database. You can set your privacy controls so that only you'll be able to see your records, or you can share them with family members or others. Searches data is not associated with your user account.

If you're not itching to come home from the doctor's office and type all of your data into a website, fret not. Microsoft is reaching out to doctors, encouraging them to submit your information directly to the website to improve communication between doctors and patients. In other words, you won't have to make a phone call to get the results of your latest test. You'll be able to go online. If Jay Parkinson is Doctor 2.0, then Microsoft wants HealthVault to be medicine 2.0.

Google is also working on a health-related offering, but there's no word on when the service will launch.

[via The New York Times and istartedsomething]

While ZocDoc is busy creating a platform for doctors to interact with their patients, Dr. Jay Parkinson figures he already has the tools he needs to run a Web 2.0-style medical practice.

Want to make an appointment to see the doctor? Check out his Google Calendar for availability and shoot Parkinson a text message or e-mail. He'll text you back and then make a house call with as little as an hour's notice. He doesn't have an office. Instead he has e-mail, instant messenger, and a cellphone. And Parkinson uses Life Record to keep his medical records online.

Parkinson is based in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, where he is targeting young creative professionals, many of whom are freelancers. That means they don't have full time jobs with health benefits. So he charges $500 a year for an initial checkup and up to 2 house calls. If you need more, you can pay per visit. If you need a specialist, he'll direct you to one. Since Parkinson isn't part of a medical network, he's contacted thousands of NY area doctors to discover specialists with the lowest prices for a variety of procedures.

What do you think? House calls are great and all, but would you be willing to see a doctor that doesn't even have an office?

[via Wired]

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.

So Google Calendar comes out, and where are the hacks? Good thing they opened it up a bit... Still, it's good to see people using the tool in some clever ways. Witness the use of Calendar for doctors. I don't know how HIPAA affects a public calendar (or the potential for exploit, given the beta status), but it's cool that a doc would think to share their schedule with the public. Even better is using Calendar to monitor your own medical condition. And if you're not into humans, preferring instead the gentle hum of a server as your constant companion, there's always a way to monitor your servers with Google Calendar.