Peer recommendations prompted Douglas Bailyn, a primary care doctor in Manhattan, to try ZocDoc in early 2010. Then, word-of-mouth endorsementsīy doctors became a powerful marketing tool. Progress was initially slow, but things improved “once they saw a return on the monthly charge,” he said. Massoumi recalled, many doctors were skeptical. “We’re making doctors more efficientĪnd helping patients find the hidden supply of health care.” That hidden supply, he explained, is the 10 to 20 percent of appointments that are made and then canceled within a day or two of the appointmentĪt first, Mr. Kharraz, a physician and ZocDoc’s chief operating officer. “We’re one of the companies that can help fix the health care system,” said Dr. Officer - see their efforts in larger terms. But the founders - Cyrus Massoumi, its chief executive, and Oliver Kharraz, both former McKinsey consultants, and Nick Ganju, the chief technology

Later rounds of supporters included the Founders Fund and Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley investor and then DST Global and Goldman Sachs.Īn online appointment-scheduling service seems straightforward. The early backers included Khosla Ventures Marc Benioff, founder of and Bezos Expeditions, which manages the personal investments of Jeffrey Bezos, founder ofĪmazon. Second, though the initial costs of starting a Web venture may be low, ZocDoc shows that building out a consumer Web service is costly. ZocDoc makes a couple of larger points - one about health care IT, and the other about Web start-ups in general.įirst, at a time when so much of the attention in health IT is focused on the national campaign to adopt electronic patient records, backed by billions of dollars in federal subsidy payments, ZocDoc is a neat bottom-up The service is free for patients doctors pay $250 a month. ZocDoc says its Web site is attracting doctor-seeking browsers at the rate of 800,000 a month, a fourfold jump from a year ago. Its 14th metropolitan market in the United States. ZocDoc, an oddly named Web service for scheduling appointments with doctors, started in New York in 2007 and has been growing at a torrid pace.

Zocdoc oliver kharraz