These websites generally charge doctors a subscription, or a fee for each booking, or both. A search for a cardiologist in Modesto, Calif., found three different doctors that day for video consultations, or an in-office doctor appointment more than 50 miles away the following day. Medical appointment websites can save patients a lot of time and effort if they’re searching for a specialist.Ī recent Zocdoc search for a psychiatrist near Miami quickly turned up an appointment the next day in Boca Raton, Fla., 40 miles away a mental health nurse practitioner available five days later and several appointments via video within a few days. The co m pany had disclosed a similar problem five years earlier. In late May, Zocdoc said a programming error could have allowed past or present staff in medical and dental offices unauthorized access to information on about 7,600 patients, according to spokeswoman Sandra Glading. Privacy rules apply to the first but often not to the second.Īdding a middleman into the booking process may create an enhanced security risk, too. To use an analogy: Imagine two desks, one belonging to your doctor’s receptionist, the other located out in the parking lot and run by a tech company asking questions about your health and serving up lists of doctors for you to check out. privacy rules written decades ago did not anticipate the rise of these new conduits to medical care, and the rules governing health data under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, don’t always apply. The potential for intimate medical details to become a commercial product exists with other online medical resources, too, from information provider sites such as WebMD to apps you might use for mental health care. They list only some of the available providers, the reviews and other information may be one-sided, and it’s hard to know just what many sites do with the data they collect about users.
Yet medical and privacy experts say it’s wise to approach the sites with some caution. The ability to make a doctor’s appointment with a few clicks of a mouse draws millions of Americans to these services every month. But instead of looking for a Thai place in your neighborhood, you search for unused doctor appointment slots, filtering by medical specialty or procedure, location, and insurance plan. Zocdoc says it did not make money from the vaccine bookings but gained visibility and goodwill.īroadly, websites like Zocdoc Solv, operating in 42 states and Qwell, based in New York City, function much as OpenTable does for restaurants.
Cities such as Chicago used the medical appointments company Zocdoc to help people find vaccination openings, and the company assisted with vaccination appointments in 21 U.S. Several of these services became prominent players in the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
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