Zocdoc Enters Practice Management, Patient Access Tech Space

Zocdoc has unveiled a new suite of tools to enable patient access and practice management, part of the Zocdoc Practice Solutions, the company announced in a press release.

The technologies will support patient intake, online appointment scheduling, and video services.

"This significant expansion takes Zocdoc beyond patient acquisition and into patient engagement for the first time," Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz, MD, said in a public statement. "We bring 16 years of experience sitting at the intersection of patients and providers, facilitating tens of millions of interactions between the two. Our mission is to give power to the patient, and we can be competitive in the patient engagement arena because engaging patients is Zocdoc's core competency, unlike others in this space."

Zocdoc has historically served to help patients find providers and book an appointment through the Zocdoc platform. This new suite of tools, which the company said will be free to any practice or provider who signs up, will be available to any patient, even if the patient does not book their appointment through Zocdoc.

In particular, patients can access patient intake tools that let them upload their insurance cards before the appointment and fill out other patient forms. Zocdoc said this can reduce the amount of time spent in the waiting room and the risk of out-of-network surprise bills.

The suite of tools will also include online appointment scheduling, which practices can host on their own websites or in a search engine, plus video services to enable virtual visits.

The tools will be able to connect across specialties, payers, and EHRs.

In the future, Zocdoc said it will launch services to support patient billing and direct messaging.

Zocdoc said the Practice Solutions suite will center the patient experience of using technology.

"We've consistently heard from providers that their costly patient engagement tools fail to actually engage patients, which adds a tremendous administrative burden to practice staff who spend their days scheduling appointments and chasing patients for critical information ahead of visits," Alex Doyne, vice president of Product at Zocdoc, said in the press release.

"We've also heard from providers that these solutions are not intuitive or easy for their office staff to use; they're hard to set up, hard to incorporate into existing workflows and hard to navigate,” Doyne added. “To add insult to injury — at a time when care organizations are more financially and operationally strained than ever — practices are paying thousands of dollars only to have many of these offerings create more work for them."