Zocdoc announces new digital tools for patient scheduling, paperwork, virtual visits

Zocdoc published this image to illustrate new its intake patient experience tool announced Sept. 19, 2023, and available free to physicians and other health care providers.
_{© Zocdoc}

Online health marketplace Zocdoc hopes to become a leader in patient engagement with new digital tools for physicians and their support staff.

The company announced the launch of Zocdoc Practice Solutions, online forms for patient intake, scheduling, and virtual visits. The platform will be available to any practice or provider, including those that are not Zocdoc marketplace customers.

For intake, patients will fill out forms and send insurance cards online ahead of visits, cutting wait times and avoiding out-of-network surprises. For online scheduling, patients can book visits online any time, saving staff time when offices are open. The video service will allow physicians to see patients in an online format compliant with federal privacy laws.

“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 news release. “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 specifically called out patient scheduling companies Phreesia, NexHealth, and Solutionreach, “which charge providers hundreds or thousands of dollars annually for many of these same services.” Those companies then hike their prices or require premium upgrades for basic functionality, the Zocdoc announcement said.

“One of the privileges of working with 80,000 providers across every state and every specialty is that we hear from them about the good, the bad, and the ugly of practicing medicine in these modern times,” Kharraz wrote in a statement published with the Zocdoc announcement. “It’s clear that providers are spending more time grappling with expensive, unintuitive software that often adds more work, and less time on actual patient care.”

Instead, Zocdoc aims to create enhance the patient experience with applications easy for medical staff to use, while saving them time. The company has almost 7,000 practices signed up to using its new Intake tool. Among them, almost 80% of patients complete required tasks before their visits, cutting administrative tasks for staffers saving an average of 15 minutes per patient, or up to two hours a day, based on an average patient flow.

Zocdoc’s announcement included two testimonials from early adopters who said the online tools have helped them round up patient paperwork while saving time and money.

Based on current performance, Zocdoc said the company is on track to grow its provider user by more than 40% and increase revenues by more than 30% this year. The growth of its marketplace allows the company to invest in making Zocdoc Practice Solutions free to physicians and other clinicians, the company said.