Doctolib‘s doctor reservation service has raised €4 Million on top of the €1 Million it raised from its investor pool earlier this year, the company announced this week. Investors include Pierre Krings & Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Kernel Investissements, as well as Lafourchette CEO Bertrand Jelensperger, where Doctolib founder Stanislas Niox-Chateau formerly worked. To date, Doctolib has grown to over 1 Million patients – no word on the number of doctors, who pay 99€/month to use the platform.
As pointed out on Frenchweb, the doctor reservation space is pretty crowded in France already. MonDocteur.fr & KelDoc come to mind, much like ZocDoc in the US.
Services around doctor reservation have a large barrier to entry, with regards to regulation around what can and can’t be said about doctors online. For example, good luck launching a review site for your doctor – giving your opinion publicly about your doctor is illegal (the assumption is that this legislation is to prevent people unhappy with their treatment from blaming the doctor, rather than the disease).
Nonetheless, finding a doctor in France is a pain in the ass. I used KelDoc last year to find an English-speaking Dentist who was less than 1 Km from my apartment – looking for this information on Google was impossible (the aforementioned regulation); however, at the time, KelDoc was only focussing on Dentists. Following their follow-up fundraising, they, too, have adding doctors to the platform.
The market is rather national, given the amount of paperwork that goes into each country’s healthcare system. While services don’t need to be able to process payments (doctors in France are paid directly, either through a debit card linked directly to your health care, called a Carte Vitale, or through direct cash/debit payment with a reimbursement form that can be mailed in), they do still need to be able to follow regulation & maintain doctor-patient confidentiality.