What do you think of ZocDoc?
I joined Zocdoc in November, I think. Maybe October.
I did a bit of research before I joined (and this was before they changed their pricing to a much more reasonable, variable, model). What I learned from talking to about half a dozen people who’ve been on it for a while is:
1) For people who accept insurance, it’s helpful. It seems to help match people with insurance with therapists who accept their insurance, and to do so in a pretty efficient way.
2) For people who don’t accept insurance…. basically, what I heard was, no one is convinced. Several people told me they thought it got them 1-3 patients a year, which, in the end, made the expense (it was $3k, before they changed their pricing model) no more than essentially break-even.
A couple of people told me they cherry-picked among their least psychodynamic treatments and asked a couple of people to review them. Others said they didn’t ask anyone.
As I said, I’ve been on about five months. A couple of impressions:
1) I’ve found the Zocdoc staff to be for the most part quite difficult to deal with – they require multiple phone conversations to accomplish things that easily can be accomplished via e-mail or online. This doesn’t seem to be a function of the individuals, who are perfectly nice, but of the company’s systems, which require them to be very high-touch. Which may work ok if you’re dealing primarily with the desk staff of a doctor’s office, but it works less well for us therapists in solitary private practice, without a support staff.
2) Their legal documents are not designed for therapists in private practice, and, while I don’t imagine the ways in which they are unreasonable are likely to cause a therapist problems, they were completely inflexible in negotiating them. (For instance: they require that clinicians respond to bookings within one hour – regardless of the time of day, or the day. No one can do that. They reassured me that they don’t terminate subscribers for violating that term, but they refused to put that in writing, so if I ever were to be contacted by a patient – let alone at night, or on a weekend – I almost certainly would, immediately, be in violation, unless I was quite lucky.)
3) Their web site is difficult to navigate, and many changes that could be made online actually require phone conversations or multiple e-mail communications back and forth. (An example: I’m moving offices; changing one’s address is not something that can be done on the web site. I’ve been trying to cause that to happen since last Friday. I’m now on my third back-and-forth e-mail with their staff to do it, and my money says we’ve got another 2 rounds to go. Before I successfully complete the seemingly simple task of changing my address.)
4) Their calendar design – and syncing with Google – is not designed with therapists’ needs in mind. It’s very clunky, and is a pain to manage.
5) Their app is only for patients, not for providers. So you have to be on your laptop/desktop, or on their poorly designed mobile provider web site, to manage.
In general, it’s just not been fun.
Which might not matter, if I were getting patients, but I’m yet to get my first Zocdoc patient.
So…. my recommendation…. If you accept insurance, maybe. But only maybe, as my understanding is that, by and large, Psychology Today does a good job of matching insurance patients with therapists. I think the real value Zocdoc offers – both for patients and providers – is the automated calendaring/scheduling (rather than the match-making). For most therapists I know, this isn’t, actually, necessarily valuable. What we want is referrals, not automated scheduling management.
(I’ll say – I’ve put the scheduling widget on my web site, and none of my existing patients ever has asked about it, or expressed interest in using it.) I know there are other automated calendaring tools out there that are probably easier to use, if that’s what you want. So…. I wouldn’t recommend ZocDoc.
