Oct 16, 2023
Dr. Oliver Kharraz is the CEO and Founder of Zocdoc, a healthcare marketplace that helps patients find and book appointments with doctors. The platform was created to address the problem of long wait times for appointments and the lack of ability to take advantage of last-minute availability on providers' schedules. The goal is to streamline the patient experience, allow doctors to reduce administrative burdens, and improve patient engagement with easy-to-use tools for messaging, payments, and virtual visits.
Oliver explains, "As we were operating the Zocdoc marketplace, we heard from our 80,000 doctors on the platform that they had trouble engaging patients. For the ones that use Zocdoc, it was easy because we're providing them a lot of the scaffolding and infrastructure. But doctors see a lot of patients who call them, who have been coming to them for a long time, or are coming to them for the first time and don't have the tools available. The tools out there are too expensive or super clunky and make it harder to engage patients, or both. And so, 80% of the doctors we talk to don't use any of these patient engagement tools, to the detriment of these practices and patients."
"If you think about all this from a patient's perspective, they have all these different tools they need to log into. There's one tool where you can find out which doctors are in network, another tool where you find out when they're available, or maybe you have to call, another tool where you figure out what the benefits are that you have, where you have to enter your clinical information, where you have to pay. There are hundreds of logins in the journey, creating login fatigue on the patient side. As a result, they are less engaged and sometimes drop out of the funnel."
#Zocdoc #PatientEngagement #DigitalHealth #HealthcareProviders #Telehealth #VirtualHealth
