Zocdoc User Guide

ZocDoc remains one of the most divisive marketing (they aren't allowed to call themselves a referral source) tools for private practice. However, signing up essentially gives them a backdoor into your wallet. Here is a guide to working effectively with ZocDoc, and putting a leash on their sticky fingers!

Learn to:

• Use if FREE!

• Reduce unfair charges

• Handle hurdles ahead of time

• See my opinions in conclusion

We got 10 good referrals out of 28 and were charged for 20 in the first month (5 were referrals ZD should NOT have charged us for). So our first session income went directly to ZD. After that, we got better at avoiding charges for bad referrals - see how below! And if you find this helpful and want to join ZD, please consider sending your contact info to allow our practice to invite you: First and Last Name, Email, Phone, Zip and Practice Name)

Guidelines that have worked for me.

Many were suggested by ZD reps, and I've discussed all of them with ZD reps as best practices.

• Spend Cap: click Dashboard, Manage Spend and select Monthly Spending. You can set a limit. This gives a sense of security, but I do not recommend it: if you have availability, why not fill it? Use the other tips below to make sure you avoid being charged for poor referrals.

• Scheduling Time Frame: keep people from schedule too soon or way into the future. When you have your initial call with the integration team, ask them to change two things:

  • There is a default 2-hour window for the soonest a client can schedule an appointment. If it is noon, the client can schedule for 2pm. Change this to 24-hours!

  • The window for how far into the future people can schedule - we like 2 weeks, and that is what we have set on simple practice.

• Don't pay for bad leads! If the patient cancels within 24-hour, you don't pay for the lead - AND you can mark the appointment cancelled for the patient. However, you can only mark the patient cancelled if the appointment time hasn't already arrived - if you let clients schedule appointments the same day, you only have until then (less than 24-hours) to mark that the patient cancelled. So, per the suggestion above, change the default scheduling window from 2-hours to 24-hours. Include in your intake email for the patient to call after booking for an initial consult, and/or call them yourself within the 24-hour window. If you don't get a hold of them or they are not a good fit, you can mark it that the patient cancelled. Essentially, if there is any reason the referral won't work, remember these two rules:

  • 24-hour window to cancel AND

  • Must be marked as a patient cancellation (click on the patient's name, click cancel and select patient cancelled)

• Best Practices:

  • Intake email policy 1) "Must complete an initial phone consult within 24-hours of scheduling or we assume that you (the patient) wishes to cancel."

  • Intake email policy 2) If you continue to have issues with cancellations despite doing a phone screen within 24-hours (we have not yet implemented this) "We have a cancellation fee of $__ if confirmed appointments are cancelled outside of a 24-hour window after you initially scheduled."

  • You or any providers in your practice must complete this initial phone consult within 24-hours.

  • Add their contact information to your Electronic Health Record and schedule their initial appointment. Collect payment information if you want to implement a cancellation policy.

  • Keep in touch with any leads you get from ZocDoc, even if they cancel. I always send an email saying "thanks for reaching out! We hope you find the resources you need. If you ever want to reconnect, please reach us at ____ and we will see if we are the right match for you."

• Two ways to stop or pause paying (and you can still get free referrals from the Google Business or website button referrals):

  • Change or eliminate working hours

  • Go to Dashboard, Managing Spending...

    • Monthly Spending and Pause or Block New Patient Bookings

    • or, Providers and de-select locations

• Out Of Office: This does not integrate from Simple Practice (at least as of publishing this blog). Open the calendar tab and click the empty white box / cell below the date to add out of office time.

• Add your providers as users so they can manage their own profile and get email notifications about leads.

• Calendar Integration: BEFORE finishing setting up your account, having your team sync their EHR calendar with Google Calendars, and have them share their EHR calendar from Google to you. Once you can see their EHR calendars in your Google Calendar account, you can setup calendar integration for your whole team. If you skip this step, you will have a few days during which your calendar is completely open to referrals any time of day or night until the integration team walks you through how to do this (then it took my coworkers a few days to figure out how to send me their calendars!).

• Booking Integration:

  • Get free bookings from Google by adding a book now button to your Google business. Super simple and easy.

  • Adding their booking button to your professional website may be helpful if you don't have a booking link, but also provides SEO via backlinking (do the same for your Psychology Today verification badge).

• Booking on the hour: since my simple practice appointments are set to 50-minutes with a 10-minute buffer to help remind patients when session ends, this permits ZD scheduling appointments at ten-till (ie,. 11:50). I either have to change Simple Practice to 60-minute sessions - not a big deal - or set my working ours in ZD to, for example, 9-9:50 for each hour, each day, AND set the visit reason times to 50-minutes. The integration team did this for me. You can edit visit reasons for your entire practice under settings, or for each provider under the providers tab. Note that at the top you can edit the duration of all visits rather than doing them individually.

• Non-Licensed Supervisees: ZD support can add them as resources under their supervisor. When a prospective patient searches for a provider and schedules with you, the resources availability is integrated with yours, and they can be scheduled with the supervisee.

• Caseload full? You can close out your availability on ZD as described above, or set your profile to only take private pay clients. You can turn off insurance from your profile, but make sure if you accept a patient and your credentialed with their insurance, the insurance company won't like if you do self-pay, and you will need a waiver that the client has decided not to use their insurance. Note: if you have supervisees listed as resources under your profile, you cannot remove insurance just for yourself.

Concluding Thoughts

Using Zocdoc, its clear they have poor gate-keeping, making it easy for people to schedule, and they make it hard for us not to pay for bad referrals. They are incentivized to do this - not only does it make the prospective patient's happy, but brings them the most money. They are completely unhelpful when you point out your charged for something outlandish and unreasonable, simply restating their process and policy, so not overspending requires vigilance.

So why have I been using it? Psychology Today has been dead and it is the slower season - I'm supporting therapists in my practice who are new to the practice or opened new hours. I remember hearing that a 4-top (table) at a restaurant is, on average, worth $10,000 of income a year. Maybe I paid $146 on average per ZD referral the first month ($73/referral, but only 50% were good referrals), but if those time-slots aren't filled, it has consequences: the clinicians are less happy or are anxious about caseload, and both the clinicians and the company aren't making money. Let's say it takes 2 months to fill that time slot otherwise. That is 8 sessions at $150, totaling $1,200 of lost income vs $1,054 if we fork over the money for the referral to ZD.

Do I want to use it? Hell no, it will be the first thing I cut when everyone's caseload is full. While their practice causes undue frustration for practice owners, I'm working on practicing tolerance (after very direct words to ZD), because it is better than not taking the referral.