Pivoting to Greater Success
Andrei Zimiles on Doctor.com’s journey to create the first unified platform for healthcare organizations
“We‘ve been through a couple iterations. At the very beginning we were thinking that we may want to be more consumer-facing than we are today,” said Andrei Zimiles, CEO of Doctor.com. “We were thinking a lot about purely patient acquisition and not thinking as broadly as we do today around, truly, how we transform the patient experience and manage the customer service layer of healthcare across the whole patient journey.”
Zimiles was speaking with Steven Krein, Co founder & CEO of StartUp Health, at the StartUp Health Village in New York, NY. They discussed Doctor.com’s business model in the early stages and how pivoting guided them from an already established startup to even greater success.
“[Today] we’re, sort of, a single unified solution to help healthcare providers better optimize and better modernize every step of the patient journey along the way,” remarked Zimiles. “From the patient choosing the right provider, through having a convenient experience getting booked, through having really easy modern communications around their visit, we’re collecting feedback and using it to go back and reinforce that initial discovery.”
Doctor.com has been from day one a continually evolving story. As Zimiles says, becoming less ‘micro focused’ on the acquisition side, and thinking more broadly about the problems they wanted to solve, he and his co founders were able to successfully pivot Doctor.com into the successful company it is today. StartUp Health’s mission is to help entrepreneurs, such as Zimiles, to widen the aperture and look with a wider lens at their business models, thus enabling them to achieve their highest potential.
“[Looking ahead] I get very excited around the idea of single sign-on for healthcare” said Zimiles. Of making it very, very easy for patients, wherever they’re going in the ecosystem, to have a streamlined way to get all the information they need to make the best possible match with a provider who’s right for them, to get into that practice efficiently and have great communications. “
“20 years from now I think our vision is that people have seamless access to go where they want to go, be able to make well-informed decisions with transparent data they have access to, and to have all the information about what happens during their plan of care stored in one place that’s easy for them to access,” Zimiles said.
