Khosla leads $3 million Series A for health start-up ZocDoc

Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm launched in 2004 by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, has led a $3 million Series A round for ZocDoc, a service for locating and booking doctors' appointments online.

ZocDoc is sort of like a cross between Yelp and Lifebooker--but with its focus on physicals, not facials. Members can search for nearby doctors, filter by insurance plan matches, find out what other members have had to say about them, and book the appointments through the site. Currently, it only serves the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but has plans to expand nationwide--that's what the funding is for.

"ZocDoc is addressing a real need in health care," Khosla said in a release Monday. He won't be joining the start-up's board of directors, but his partner David Weiden will. "The Internet has the potential to fundamentally improve access to care, and the company has gained initial traction towards this long-term vision," he said in the statement.

Plenty of much bigger names have been getting on the online health care bandwagon, but most of them have been focusing on medical records, not appointment booking.

[mobiletekman]

There is definitely a huge market here and a lot of potential innovation in the dental space - the real trick is penetrating an extremely fractured market - every dental practice is another small business that must be sold to and 'convinced' - the ZocDoc team has done a good job of penetrating a relatively small geographic market - I am curious to see their strategy for achieving ubiquity - I own a dental based startup (a mobile dental laboratory that uses CAD/CAM) and we are in the same boat

[abrydon]

I suspect ZocDoc will succeed where many others have failed because of the killer feature - online scheduling ala Open Table.

On the patient side, It's fair to point out that there are many other services offering doctor reviews that not reached critical mass - RateMDs, DrScore, MyDocHub, Vitals, Book of Doctors, Dr Scorecard - and ask why ZocDoc will fare any better.

The answer is that ZocDoc has a single killer feature that the others lack - online scheduling. It's this killer feature that will drive greater use and adoption than simple reviews. If it were just about ratings and reviews - Yelp for Doctors - I'd expect ZocDoc's quick demise. But the booking solution - OpenTable for Doctors - provides much broader and greater value and appeal.

The larger audience will drive volume and credibility in the reviews that doesn't exist on less trafficked sites, and make the physicians care about these reviews in a way that they don't care about the other sites.

I've written a bit more about this at
http://www.antonybrydon.com/2008/08/can-zocdoc-save.html