“Our goal has always been to build products that empower patients and address problems in healthcare that haven’t yet been solved,” Massoumi said.

Not surprisingly, medical officers testing ZocDoc Check-In have reported more efficient workflows and increased accuracy for paperwork. Being able to fill out paperwork early was the most requested feature from patients, ZocDoc says. ZocDoc Check-In is free for both patients and doctors, and the company says around 10 percent of patients will have access to the feature today. We needed to extensively test this with some of our practices prior to launch, to ensure that the training we provided led to good adoption among practices and offered a stellar experience for patients.” There’s also a tremendous human engineering piece to this. “Not only is there a highly complex engineering and data entry effort involved in uploading or converting each practice’s forms and tagging each field. “It’s something we’ve been developing and testing for some time now, but we wanted to perfect it before rolling it out more broadly,” ZocDoc founder and CEO Cyrus Massoumi told VentureBeat over e-mail today, when asked how long the company was working on the new feature.

ZocDoc now serves more than 1.8 million patients per month. The company’s core service lets patients quickly find doctors (who pay $300 a month to list on the service) and book appointments online or through its mobile apps. ZocDoc, one of New York City’s hottest startups, boasts that this is the first major product it’s added since launching in 2007.

Zocdoc appointment