‘Doctor’s Office’
courtesy of ‘Kelly Sue’
As we’ve progressed further and further into the digital age (and I’m speaking here of time, and not necessarily of social progress) we’ve gotten the ability to schedule a lot of things online. Grocery Delivery, Flights, Trains, Concert Tickets, Car Pickup, Maintenance Appointments. The more I can read the appointment availability schedule for myself, the more I can arrange my schedule to my own satisfaction instead of feeling at the beck and call of others. It’s freeing to make your own appointments.
Enter ZocDoc. They’ve worked with 12,000 doctors and dentists in the DC area to build an appointment system that you can access online. Tell it your health insurance, and what speciality or kind of generalist that you want to see, and it finds appointments in their schedule and puts them up for you to see. Got the sniffles or possibly the swine flu in 20010 and you’ve got Care First insurance? There are appointments for twelve different doctors in DC for today. How about Humana PPO instead? Eleven docs are waiting for you.
Where was this when I needed a GP appointment two months ago and had to wait five weeks to see someone?
I live and work in the District of Columbia. I write at We Love DC, a blog I helped start, I work at Technolutionary, a company I helped start, and I’m happy doing both. I enjoy watching baseball, cooking, and gardening. I grow a mean pepper, keep a clean scorebook, and wash the dishes when I’m done. Read Why I Love DC.
ZocDocs is great, I actually just got back to the office from an appointment with a GP that I booked on Tuesday of this week. I have United Health and I had plenty of options (15-20 if I remember correctly) in network. Great idea, I’m excited for more doctors to embrace this new concept.
To give an idea, you search by plan and location, they provide doctors first by whether or not they are in your network, then by proximity. The slots available are shown and once you have an account, it’s only 2-3 clicks before you book. They then contact the doctor’s office who confirms the appointment (in case they’d booked it offline and hadn’t updated the site). You can also cancel through the site, but obviously this is subject to the individual doctor’s policy.
Great site though, highly recommend. I would say to combine with a doctor rating site though if you’re particular as it seems there’s no rating/comments available through ZocDocs. A doctor with tons of availability during cold/flu season should raise at least mild concern.
On second thought, just got an email asking me to rank my doctor and it says they show a rating once they get three reviews. So it will provide that service, although I’m not sure how effective it may be depending on how anonymous the ratings are.
Check out the NYC ratings. I think DC lacks ratings because it’s new. Apparently, it’s actually a good tool for doctors also, because it tells them where they can improve.
Yes it’s great it finally comes to DC but nothing really new here. Seems just to have a good PR compared to other sites. I used other sites like appointmentseasy.com and great too. I think it’s even free for MDs.