Fresh off a seed round investment of 700K€ from Alven Capital, Paris-based KelDoc has released an iPhone App allowing users to quickly find a doctor in their neighborhood. The first version of the launch is available for just the Paris region, and focuses specifically on dentists, but the value added is quite apparent from the first time you use it.
Co-founder Eduardo Ronzano, a former associate at investment bank Global Equities, has said that searching for a doctor and setting up an appointment can take hours, calling from office to office trying to find the next available appointment time. For expatriates, the language barrier and lack of familiarity with the system can make it difficult to know, for example, how much it will cost, what services a doctor offers, and what languages a doctor speaks. KelDoc (which loosely means “which doctor” in French) has launched to solve this issue, and I actually booked a dentist through the service while it was still in private beta, and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was.
When I went to meet my dentist – Dr. Norek, for anyone in Paris who needs an emergency dentist who speaks great English – he and I both had questions to ask each other: I was his first patient from KelDoc, and he was the first dentist I’d booked online. Ronzano had already explained to me that they verify all their doctors, and, especially for launch, make sure that they have a certain level of professionalism that will please the service-demanding consumer. Dr. Norek told me that setting up the system for him was easy – he had met Ronzano personally and was impressed with the possibility of getting new clients via the service. Filling out my medical information, I glanced at his screen just in time to see him mark “KelDoc” in the referral section, and realized that KelDoc has cleverly integrated itself into medical admin software, making it easy for doctors to manage all of their appointments on the service, bringing one of the last professions that is still largely pen & paper into digital.
The service is new – Rude Baguette doesn’t usually cover launches – but with clean teeth, I can tell you that for both locals and foreigners, for doctors as well as patients, KelDoc has found the right ingredients to make a sticky app. I plan to book all my appointments through them in the future.