We’ve established our beachhead market within new specialist visits, totaling over $6B.
Conservative Estimates
~400M Specialist Visits
~100M New Visits
60M New Visits are Patient Scheduled
~50% of Referrals not Completed,
$100 = Average Zocdoc Cost for Specialists Placement Visit.
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120M New Visits * $100 per New Visit = $12B
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Medium Term Growth into Specialist workflows:
Patient Intake
Clinical Screening
Patient Engagement
Prior Auth
Medium Term Growth into Adjacent Buyors
Payor: Site of Service Optimization to Route Patients to lowest cost of care environment.
PCP: Quality and Outcomes Scores and Penalization Avoidance by placing patients sooner.
In the U.S., the “moment after the PCP visit” is already enormous in completed specialty care alone. CDC’s 2018 NAMCS estimates ~94.9M new-patient visits to medical + surgical specialists in office-based settings each year (i.e., first-time visits to that specialist practice).
A meaningful share of those new specialty journeys are clearly patient-initiated: NAMCS reports that among new visits to non-PCP clinicians, ~21.6% are “not referred for this visit” (and an additional ~15.9% have unknown referral status). Applying those NAMCS referral-status shares to new specialist visits implies on the order of ~20M+ new specialist visits/year are direct-access / not physician-referred (and ~15M are unknown).
Even when a physician referral exists, patients still frequently do the booking work. There isn’t a single national “who booked” statistic, but a large pediatrics referral-coordination study found the referring practice scheduled the specialist appointment only 39.3% of the time—meaning ~60.7% required patient/family scheduling. Using that as a conservative baseline (±10 percentage points to reflect variation), the patient-handled share of physician-referred new specialist visits is roughly 50–70%—tens of millions of bookings per year.
And this is just the completed visit universe. Real referral operations show large drop-off and “black hole” behavior: in one large health-system analysis of 103,737 referral scheduling attempts, only 34.8% resulted in a documented completed appointment and 38.9% lacked an appointment date—implying the true volume of attempted specialty scheduling journeys is much larger than what’s observed in completed visits.
The burden on patients is heavy: one audit found it takes ~3.27 calls and ~29.77 minutes of caller time just to secure an appointment, and access delays are often measured in weeks—AMN Healthcare reports an average ~31-day wait for a new patient appointment across surveyed specialties/metros.
Making this workflow dramatically easier should increase completion and reduce leakage by converting “referral intent” into a booked, prepared visit.