meeting with ZocDoc’s Director of Communications
after i visited Agile Health, i booked it to the Garage, a restaurant a few blocks away, to meet up with ZocDoc’s Director of Communication, Karsten Vagner.
we gulped back a couple beers, ate some chicken quesadillas and had a nice talk about who i was, who they were, and where they were going.
i already knew who they were but it was nice to connect a face to a company. very rarely can you just go up to a business and say “hey, want to meet up for lunch?”
ZocDoc is OpenTable for doctors.
if you don’t know opentable.com, you are missing out. whenever, i travel to a bigger city or plan a dinner with friends, i use this service to make online reservations. it’s neat because it gives you a profile of the restaurant, hours, website, menu, etc and proceeds to tell you what availability they have at the time you request. if i want a table for 6 between 6 and 8, that restaurant will let me know if they can accomodate that. and then i book it with a click, and im done. i dont have to call, be put on hold, or wait for the someone to manually look through their appointment book. i love the simplicity of doing it myself, at my leisure, online.
that’s ZocDoc for doctors. if you’re sick and you can only come during lunch time since you’re a busy fulltime worker-bee, you pop on their website, search for a primary care doc in your city, and up comes a list of doctors who can see you. click, bang, boom, you’re set to go see a doctor.
you can also filter your search to find only docs who accept your insurance company or your insurance plan. convenient.
this service is especially good for travelers. if you fly to Washington DC for a meeting, and you get a cold, where do you go? to the ER where it costs a thousand dollars and several hours of waiting to be seen and further burdening the immense non-emergency traffic that the ER treats? please dont.
instead, go to ZocDoc and find a primary care doc who’s available at 4pm the day before your meeting and get treated. simple.
neat concept. neat business.
founded in 2007 by 3 guys. one who ruptured his ear drum on an airplane and couldn’t find a doctor in that city for 3 days. a doctor who believes in the marriage of medicine and technology. and a computer guy who used to work at Bizrate, a place to compare prices online. cool !
right now the company has networks in new york city, washington dc, and san francisco. they are in the process of finding a new city to expand their service. and the way they choose a city is by a majority vote of consumers! that’s cool.
doctors who want to be listed in ZocDoc’s site have to pay monthly. i forgot how much. i think it’s 200 dollars. patients do not pay a dime.
i hope ZocDoc gets as big as OpenTable because i really believe it will help a lot of people get timely care.
thanks for meeting up karsten!
good luck ZocDoc!
next, i caught a taxi to the Museum of Modern Art and met up with a friend from medical school.
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