Zocdoc is an American company that provides patients with the ability to find doctors and arrange meetings with them online or offline. The patient, using the Zocdoc website or a mobile application, finds the necessary medical specialist in a comfortable location and makes an appointment. A visit to a doctor can be one-off, for example, if you need to choose lenses for your eyes, cure a tooth, or make a bandage. Making an appointment can also be the first step to establishing a long-term relationship with the practitioner. After the procedure, patients, as a rule, leave a review in the profile of the attending physician, so each medical specialist has his own rating of visitors. Many specialists may be covered by health insurance.
The business model of the Zocdoc platform is structured as follows. Medical professionals pay for the platform services themselves for each attracted client. Thus, the more a healthcare professional attracts patients through Zocdoc, the more he pays to the platform for marketing services. The Zocdoc scheduling system can be made available to physicians both as an online service, through specialized software, or it can even be integrated with a website. Zocdoc services are free for patients. Customers can find the healthcare professional they need by specifying the desired parameters on the website or in the application, for example, the symptom or reason for the visit, the doctor’s name, as well as their location and health insurance information. At the end of 2012, Zocdoc added a registration function that allows patients to fill out medical forms online in advance. For each specific doctor, users can see free slots in the schedule and sign up for a specific time, including for a virtual visit.
During the pandemic, Zocdoc began developing its own telemedicine division, using medical workers who were forced to work remotely. As part of the new direction, the company has developed a HIPAA-compliant platform Zocdoc Video Service (ZVS), which doctors in their network can use for online consultations with patients. In the first week after the launch of the telemedicine service, Zocdoc reported that more than 20% of the total number of bookings were made specifically for online consultations. Currently, the share of online consultations has exceeded 40%.
Last year, Zocdoc also launched a pilot COVID vaccination planning program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. The Zocdoc Vaccine Scheduler platform has been integrated with the company’s website to screen and schedule patients completely free of charge. In the early days of peak traffic, the planner booked over 100 visits per minute. The Zocdoc Vaccine Scheduler has been adopted by the City of Chicago and health systems across the country to help expedite vaccination of the population domestically. Zocdoc continues to scale the platform, which is an effective marketing ploy.
The last public investment round of Zocdoc took place in 2015, in which the main investors were Founders Fund, Atomico and Baillie Gifford. Zocdoc raised $ 130 million and was valued at $ 1.9 billion. According to Crunchbase, a private investment round took place in February 2021, during which $ 150 million was raised in favor of the American private investment company Francisco Partners, which specializes exclusively in investments in technology services. The company’s valuation during this round was not disclosed. Zocdoc plans to invest the raised funds in personnel and marketing, as well as expanding its product line. In total, since 2008, Zocdoc has raised $ 377 million, and among the main investors are venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, as well as investment banks, including Goldman Sachs.
In our opinion, Zocdoc is taking the right steps to grow its telemedicine business. Thanks to the pandemic, the telemedicine market began to develop rapidly. Thus, Deloitte expects that the percentage of online consultations worldwide will grow from 1% of all visits in 2019 to 5% by the end of this year. Grand View Research, has calculated that the volume of the global telemedicine services market last year amounted to almost $ 56 billion, while the dominant position is occupied by the US market. In the period from 2014 to 2020, the American telemedicine market grew to $ 26 billion, and by the end of 2025 its volume will increase to $ 64 billion. According to the Global Market Insights, by 2027, the global telemedicine market will increase to $ 186.7 billion, where the US market will be accounts for almost half of the world’s volume.