Healthcare at the heart of the digital revolution

Nowadays, we are used to make appointments for the doctor, dentist or other healthcare specialists through the phone. We dial the number of the practice, we dial our way through a phone menu and in the end, after waiting in line for a couple of minutes, we reach the assistant who tells us when our desired specialist is available for an appointment. This appointment scheduling is a daily struggle for doctors and clients. There are 8 billion European doctor appointments booked annually and doctors spend 18 hours a week on average scheduling these appointments.

Doctolib
Doctolib is a French startup that aims to make this process more efficient. The SaaS (software as a service) doctor booking platform is a service that finds nearby health professionals at whom the client can book and track appointments online. Doctolib uses cloud computing and the internet to improve healthcare access for patients in France.

The startup consists of a community of over 17.000 specialists such as dermatologists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists, urologists, ophthalmologists and allergists. Doctolib collaborates with 435 healthcare centers, such as hospitals, clinics and other establishments.
The service is able to help reduce booking costs of healthcare specialists up to 30% and simultaneously help decrease no-shows up top 75%. Furthermore, Doctolib puts specialists on the map and make them more visible to clients. Through this, specialists get around 20 new clients per month. For the Software, healthcare specialists pay a monthly fee of €99,-.

The main goal of Doctolib is to help healthcare specialists with their appointment scheduling with online reservations. Doctolib strives to deliver a seamless healthcare experience for healthcare specialists and patients.

Competition
That all sounds very impressive, but there are several players on the market that offer online reservation systems. The main advantage of Doctolib over its competition is that it uses cloud computing. Doctolib tries to offer an innovative, integrated experience through the cloud, to give doctors a clearer, up to date overview of their schedule. This requires large amounts of human effort and the dedicated employees of Doctolib get this done. That is why Doctolib has a competitive advantage, higher customer satisfaction and a market share of 80%.

Efficiency criteria
Doctolib can be seen as efficient business model since patients are better off, doctors are better off and there are no other firms on the market that offer similar integrated solutions. Doctolib creates value for clients and doctors, if more participants of both groups use the software, both parties maximize their profitability.

Future
The software is now only available for doctors in France, but Doctolib is currently working on an expansion towards Germany. The long-term purpose for Doctolib is to take over the entire European market.

All things considered, Doctolib has a bright and promising future. I am very curious what Doctolib will bring to the healthcare industry and if the Netherlands will soon be conquered by this tech startup.