ZocDoc is free for patients and levies a flat fee for doctors, ranging from $100 to $250 per month. ZocDoc recently added its first hospital, the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, which brought 800 new doctors onto the company's roster. At the end of this month, it will expand to San Francisco.
Now the site books visits for tens of thousands of doctors in 14 specialties across New York's five boroughs and in Washington, D.C. When went live in September 2007, it only scheduled appointments with dentists in Manhattan. "They specifically did not want to take on too much," Chang says. That narrow focus has been key to its success so far. ZocDoc started by targeting doctors in just one metropolitan area. Several companies - most notably, one called Xoova that tried to provide the service nationwide - have tried but failed, often because their plans were overly ambitious, says Christine Chang, healthcare technology analyst at Ovum, a London-based research firm. Massoumi wasn't the first person to think booking doctor's appointments online would be a good idea. The small business has 30 employees and is about to outgrow its second Manhattan office space. Three years later, ZocDoc has scored $3 million in venture capital funding from big-name investors including Jeff Bezos of ( AMZN, Fortune 500) and Marc Benioff of ( CRM). In April 2007, they formed ZocDoc in Ganju's apartment. The two left McKinsey and invited a third partner, Nick Ganju, to join them. So Massoumi, who was working at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, shared the idea of an online scheduling service with one of his colleagues, Oliver Kharraz, a physician and electronic health systems specialist. "Why can't I book doctor's appointments the same way I book restaurants or flights?"
"I thought, 'Wow, this is a problem,'" he recalls. All told, it took him four days of research and phone calls to schedule an appointment for his painful malady. Once Massoumi sorted that out, he faced another challenge: lack of information about the quality of the physicians who accepted his insurance. His insurance company provided a list of local doctors covered by his plan, but it was hopelessly out of date.
0 kommentar(er)
