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Nothing pleasant ever results from getting sick (except, or course, if you’re not really sick on one of those ‘sick days’) but recently my sore throat brought me to an unexpected cure: ZocDoc.com. It’s been named the OpenTable for the medical community, where with a few keystrokes users can access doctors, dentists, and appointments in their cities based on insurance type and reviews from fellow users. Conveniently enough, appointments can even be booked for later the same day. It is also—drum roll please—free!
Founded in 2007, ZocDoc has been building its services at a blazing speed. The company has launched in several cities across the US, including right here in Boston. Back in October it was ranked 32 in Business Insider’s The Most Valuable Startups in the World and more recently became a winner of the InfoWorld 2012 Technology Leadership Award. Compete data tells their story clearly. Currently ZocDoc.com is ranked number 12 in the Insurance and Physicians category with just over 540K unique visitors for the month of June—that’s a 200% increase over last year (shown below compared to the rest of the Insurance and Physician category).
In May, ZocDoc rolled into its 18th and 19th markets in Tampa Bay and Denver, and the expanding opportunity that new markets bring has been seen heavily in June’s data. Checking the traffic dashboard, I can see that in the month of June the site experienced just below 720k visits with 85K visits resulting from direct traffic, a 50% increase from last month’s direct traffic visits.
Compete’s competitive intelligence shows such is the power of ZocDoc: currently the number one site in ZocDoc’s category, Healthgrades.com, is feeling ZocDoc’s growing presence. Filtering for Healthgrade.com’s outgoing traffic lost to competitive sites, ZocDoc.com is the number 3 spot with a cool 260% change in share.
With search engine technology fueling the Internet, every question, inquiry, and thought is typed into a search bar. One of the more important searched keywords—“Find a doctor”—shows ZocDoc.com as the number 2 destination, right behind Webmd.com.
Demographics prove to be key for the site’s success. Several of the doctors who use the service have patients whose average age group fall in the mid-thirties—“a group accustomed to arranging their lives online.” But it’s also working for the young and the old: last week ZocDoc’s mobile app (and as a proud Blackberry user, I’m overjoyed it’s available on my phone) was named the AARP app of the week. And the company just announced at the end of June the launch of ZocDoc en Espanol, enabling the Spanish speaking patient population to more easily access healthcare. It’s pretty awesome to see a start-up empowering people everywhere, and it’s pretty awesome to see Compete data telling their story; thank you, sore throat, for this single treasure! In today’s digital age, it’s all about real-time access to the data we need, and real-time access to practical solutions that meet our needs—ZocDoc provides us with precisely that.