ZocDoc featured at NY Tech Meetup

Watch ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi present at the NY Tech Meetup on May 13, 2008. Donning bright orange scrubs, Cyrus talked about the company's mission to help patients easily find a doctor or dentist and make an appointment instantly online.

Audience members gave ZocDoc a friendly reception and began Twittering instantly, calling ZocDoc "impressive," "the best" and "a great example of the mainstream web." Check out some of their comments here. A lively Q&A covered everything from the business model, roll-out plan & the patient first ethics of the business - watch yourself.

After the meetup, ZocDoc hosted a happy hour at St. Mark's Ale House to kick off its developer contest, offering a MacBook Air to a developer that makes the best use of the new ZocDoc API. Cheers to that!

ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi speaks to the audience at NY Tech Meetup. ZocDoc helps consumers find a doctor or dentist and is particularly useful because it filters by insurance, shows real-time availability, and a map with doctor locations.

ZocDoc Announces Developer Contest - Win a MacBook Air!

Today, ZocDoc kicked off a contest for software developers to create new applications that help patients book doctor appointments anywhere on the web. ZocDoc users have frequently requested integrations into popular applications and devices such as Facebook and iPhones, among others.

The contest, which runs from now until August 1, 2008, challenges developers to build the application that will most benefit patients looking for a doctor. A new API allows developers to pull data from ZocDoc such as doctor and dentist information, practice locations, pictures, URLs and available appointment times, which can be integrated into custom mashups and applications. The developer of the application that benefits the most users (as measured by appointments made) wins a brand new MacBook Air!

If you are a developer, visit the ZocDoc Developer Center to register for the API.

And as always, we love hearing your feedback so keep sending us emails or visit ZocDoc on Facebook.

"I LOVE ZocDoc" - Thank You for the Great Feedback

A month ago, we sent all ZocDoc users a simple email: what are your experiences good or bad, and what should we do better?

We had braced ourselves for a healthy mix of compliments and constructive criticism. A few hundred responses later we are flattered beyond belief. Some of you had great ZocDoc stories to share:

"I really liked ZocDoc. I work in a cublicle type setting and don't like making phone calls regarding personal information while at work, though I also don't want to be standing on the street calling doctors so it was ideal for me."

"I'm not from New York and I have not had good experiences dealing with receptionists at medical offices here. They have been horribly rude and so this was a way for me to avoid that."

"I had an emergency and needed someone who was available on a Saturday afternoon."

"I LOVE ZocDoc. It made the bewildering process of finding a primary care physician painless."

Of course, we are heartened by these stories, so by all means, keep them coming. At the same time, we'd like to hear your ideas on how to make ZocDoc better.

You can keep sending us emails or use ZocDoc on facebook to start a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you either way.

Thanks again,

Your friends at ZocDoc

ZocDoc is featured on NBC's "Sree Advice"

Hear Sree Sreenivasan in conversation with Darlene Rodriguez and Rob Morrison about ZocDoc on WNBC's "Sree Advice." He likes the ability to filter doctors by insurance, see their availability, and book online with an instant confirmation - thanks Sree! And Darlene wants to use ZocDoc to make an appointment - we are looking forward to it.

Along comes ZocDoc

ZocDoc's idea is simple: find a dentist or doctor and book online.

The general concept is  well established - sites like OpenTable and Orbitz have shown the impact and convenience of online scheduling. We are proud to be recognized by The New York Times as a leader who helps shape the field, e.g. by helping consumers make a decision on healthcare providers they don't know yet:

"ZocDoc, which operates in New York and started late last year, is trying to overcome this hurdle by also posting reviews of the city’s medical providers, so users have more confidence when booking for the first time. Mr. Thibodeau said that whatever hurdles these companies face in the short term are dwarfed by the opportunity."

 

Organizations like the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, which is deeply involved in the transformation of healthcare through technology, say this about us:

"The market won't stand still. While a bunch of us are futzing around with patient portals, PHRs, patient kiosks, and other tools to add convenience to health care delivery, along comes ZocDoc which allows online scheduling of physician and dentist appointments for participating providers."

Thanks for the kind words. Hopefully, we'll be in Massachusetts soon. See you there.

ZocDoc is Brooklyn Bound

More than 2,700 users have requested ZocDoc for Brooklyn since we launched. We have taken it as a great encouragement, and as an obligation to deliver.

We are thus happy to announce that patients can find Brooklyn doctors and dentists on ZocDoc starting today. Practices are now available in Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Bay Ridge, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Downtown Brooklyn, with more to come in the next few weeks. As always, if your doctor or dentist is not on ZocDoc yet, let us know.

We’ll be adding the other boroughs, New Jersey and Connecticut soon. If you’d like to be notified, please subscribe to our news blog.

Primary Care hits a Sweet Spot with Patients and Physicians

When ZocDoc launched primary care on Valentine’s day last month, we were hopeful that patients would show our physicians some love. What happened surpassed even our most optimistic scenarios: within 15 minutes of making doctors available on ZocDoc, the first patient booked an appointment.

Thanks go to all of our users who have kept us (and the ZocDoc doctors) busy since then. With offices in the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Gramercy, Tribeca, and SoHo, patients could find a doctor on ZocDoc in many neighborhoods from day one.

Doctors love the service as well – many were initially in disbelief that joining ZocDoc is free for them, and were pleasantly surprised how quickly ZocDoc connected them with their patients.

While we are growing our base of primary care doctors (if your doctor doesn’t participate yet, you can nominate here), we are already starting to plan our next specialty. What would you like to see next on ZocDoc? Let us know!

ZocDoc Selected as a Webware 100 Finalist

Every year, Webware (a CNET site) selects the 100 leading internet sites. This year, they have selected ZocDoc as one of the 300 finalists among 4,600 candidates!

We are, of course, not building ZocDoc to win prizes. We are creating a platform to make healthcare simpler and people’s lives better. At the same time we are honored and humbled to be mentioned along great sites like Amazon, eBay, OpenTable, Google and Microsoft.

The ultimate winners will be selected by a vote of the general public, starting today. We realize that we are a much newer company than many of the other nominees, but we are energized by the enthusiastic feedback we’ve been getting from both our patients and our doctors. So, if you like our service, please vote for us!

PS: Do you live out of NYC? Voting for us will help bring ZocDoc to your neighborhood!

HONcode for ZocDoc: Our Promise to Patients

ZocDoc’s adherence to high ethical standards for health-related websites has just been certified by The Health On the Net Foundation, an NGO with a special consultative status with the United Nations.

We are proud to comply with the 8 principles laid out in the HONcode (among them Privacy, Transparency, Authority). We also follow additional policies to make sure the interests of patients come first on ZocDoc. Oliver Kharraz, MD, our Chief Medical Officer, pledges

• Results without Bias: We don’t accept payment for a preferred placement in our search results. We always show the results first which we believe will be most useful to you.
• Real Patient Reviews: Only actual patients can leave reviews for our doctors. This eliminates the rating fraud that is going on at many doctor rating sites

We do this because we want to be just as professional as you’d expect your doctor to be. We are looking forward to earning your trust.

ZocDoc Invites Primary Care Physicians to Apply

Starting today, ZocDoc encourages medical professionals who want to be part of our first roll-out wave to apply for ZocDoc. The first doctors on the system will be primary care physicians, family practitioners, and general internists in Manhattan (for coverage in other areas, see "Where Next, ZocDoc?").

Interested professionals are encouraged to apply early to avoid a waiting period.

PS: If you are practicing dentistry, a medical specialty other than family medicine/ primary care, or outside of Manhattan, we still encourage you to register. We'll process your application when we expand the scope of specialties and/or our service area.

If you are a patient and would like your doctor to use ZocDoc, please send us a note to nominate@ZocDoc.com.

Where Next, ZocDoc? - America Votes 2008

If you live in New York, ZocDoc has made finding a dentist easy for a couple of months now.

However, if you live somewhere else, then you may be interested to hear that we've given our users the power to select the city ZocDoc will come to next: The New ZocDoc City will be determined in a fair & democratic process.

We are currently accepting nominations for candidate cities. If your city isn't marked below, make sure to vote today and rally your friends and co-workers, too.

And here are our front-runners today:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Washington, DC San Francisco Chicago Los Angeles San Jose Seattle

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Philadelphia Atlanta Boston Detroit Charlotte Oakland

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Miami Dallas Austin Chapel Hill Portland St. Louis

The Wall Street Journal Takes Notice of ZocDoc

Look out for an article by Rebecca Buckman in today's WSJ. While she is worried that the Web 2.0 may be a bubble, her biggest worry about ZocDoc seems to be that we have only a 2% market penetration (less than three weeks after launch):

Among firms presenting there was ZocDoc Inc., which lets people make appointments with doctors and dentists online. The New York company has listings for only 2% of the dentists in Manhattan and no physicians, but it has attracted interested investors, says its CEO, Cyrus Massoumi. Read the full article

We believe that's a fair point. And we pledge to increase penetration of dentists and add physicians soon. But we appreciate that the WSJ wrote about us twice already (the first time was in the WSJ blog).

Update as of November 16:

This is a plot of the number of bookable hours available on ZocDoc for every week from launch until today. We are proud to have a 4-fold increase in the five weeks since Rebecca wrote her article. We credit some of this increase to the attention we got after the Wall Street Journal mentioned us twice. Thank you Rebecca!

 

ZocDoc Launch Wins Accolades from the Press

It's always good to feel appreciated, but the response to our launch and press release has shown us that we are not alone in our belief that finding doctors and dentists is a major pain point for many fellow Americans.

Here is what the press thinks:

	One of my favorites was featured in the "Revenue Models and Analytics" session. ZocDoc ... bills itself as way to make doctor and dentist appointments online. ZocDoc allows you to input your health insurance carrier and a zip code. Many of our readers might now exclaim that this is ... possible through your carrier's web site already. As even more of our readers are aware, insurance company directories of medical professionals are typically not very user-friendly. Beyond that, there's no way to know what other people think of a particular doctor and no way to see availability or make appointments. ZocDoc lets you find the best local dentists and book appointments online... The site features metadata like ratings, reviews, medical degrees, universities, awards won, and, most importantly, open spots on their schedule. The real killer feature is the ability to book a slot on a doctor's schedule without ever having to pick up the phone... Read the full article
	ZocDoc is a Web site to allow you sign up for doctor and dentist appointments. ... You can restrict search by insurance type, location, ratings of doctors and other features. Also works from mobile phones. The site goes live today, starting with dentists in Manhattan. Starts with 2% of Manhattan dentists. Experts time: ... Esther Dyson: Says ... My heart is with ZocDoc; challenge is going to be marketing and visibility; ratings fraud that all review sites deal with; if you can deal with the problems, I think you have a winner; people are fleeing the United Healthcare site and looking for something intelligible. The ZocDoc guy says he has looked at leaders in online feedback space; they are committed to feedback being fair; practitioners get opportunity to respond; if factually incorrect, they will pull it down, on case by case basis. Read the full article and more Barron's coverage here
	A case in point is ZocDoc.com, a New York-based startup that launched on Tuesday as a way to help people to find doctors and dentists online and to screen them to determine what insurance they accept and what kind of reputation they have. Although all major health insurance companies provide their own lists of specialists, those lists are notoriously inaccurate and out of date. ZocDoc founder Cyrus Massoumi, who conceived the business after a a sinus infection led to a ruptured ear drum during a cross-country flight, said the list of doctors his insurance provider offered was hopelessly long and gave no information beyond the doctors' names. "I was praying that the doctor whose name started with an 'A' had finished in the top of his class," he joked. Legendary high-tech investor Esther Dyson said she was excited by the business, which she said "solves a huge problem." Once when she needed immediate care, Dyson admitted, she selected a doctor whose name began with a "B" solely because the name was at the top of the list. "People are fleeing the United Healthcare site," she said. Read the full article
	You can also check out a dentist's online profile, which includes important information like their specialties, education, languages spoken, and affiliations with professional organizations. Each dentist profile page includes a map and a list of user-submitted patient reviews. Think of it being like a background check before your date with the drill. This is a great concept ... Read the full article
	ZocDoc, a good way to get a dentist or doctor recommendation on the fly — This site lets you put in your zip code, and then look for things like an emergency appointment with a dentist, or a consultation about a bad rash with a doctor. ZocDoc returns results of the best rated physicians according to user input. It lets you sort by those who accept your insurance. It also gives you a profile page stating where the doctor or dentist went to school, research papers they’ve written, and other notes by users. Most of us get doctors or dentists from personal recommendations, but sometimes that’s not good enough. That’s when ZocDoc comes in handy. The site just went live, so is relatively spartan. It has about 2 percent of Manhattan’s dentists listed already. Read the full article

Addendum on October 1, 2007:

The new ZocDoc.com lets patients book physician and dentist appointments online, similar to the way OpenTable.com allows diners to make online reservations for restaurants. Read the full article

ZocDoc launches at TechCrunch40

Today at 10:45 am PST our service went live at TechCrunch40, where ZocDoc was selected as one of the 40 hottest startups globally by Michael Arrington and his team. Not a small compliment, considering they have reviewed thousands of companies in the TechCrunch Blog (one of the top 3 tech blogs worldwide). 

With ZocDoc, New Yorkers will now be able to find a dentist online and book an appointment instantly. ZocDoc can filter dentists by insurance & location and makes background information and patient reviews available. You can see Cyrus Massoumi and Oliver Kharraz, MD, our two co-founders, demonstrate the site at TechCrunch below.

We also had great comments from the discussion panel. Guy Kawasaki is probably slow in the adoption curve. He is more likely to ask Jason Calacanis for help than to use ZocDoc himself - but only for particular conditions. Please see his humorous exchange with our co-founder, Cyrus Massoumi:

But Esther Dyson thinks that we "solve a huge problem."  Hear her comments in detail:

Thanks also to the audience for their great response: they gave us the third-highest score in the TechCrunch40.