ZocDoc helps you book medical appointments faster - DLS Interview

ZocDoc is launching a limited public beta today. The site lets you search for a doctor or dentist based on location, specialty, and what kind of insurance they accept. It's sort of like OpenTable, but instead of making restaurant reservations you're making making appointments that could be matters of life or death. We guess the same could be true of some restaurants.

At launch, ZocDoc is only available for dentists in New York. Eventually the site plans to add doctors, first in New York and then in other cities. Visitors to the site will be able to vote on which cities they want to add, and the goal is to be in 1 or 2 more cities within the next year and in 8 or more cities within 2 years.

The site is officially launching at TechCrunch40 tomorrow, but we wanted to know why anyone would use the site, so we interviewed CEO Cyrus Massoumi (see the video). He says he's confident ZocDoc will fill the needs of both patients and doctors, and estimates that online medical appointments could become a $15-30 billion industry. We're a bit dubious of those numbers, but when it comes to medical expenses, anything is possible. Patients won't have to pay to use the service. Doctors will.

You can also download the audio of this interview if you'd like or subscribe to our podcast for all our audio interviews. Our Podcast is also available through iTunes.

Tags: appointments, dentist, doctor, insurance, medical, webmd, zocdoc