Doctor.com Announces Merger with Connect Healthcare

The physician-minded digital tools suite Doctor.com announced earlier today that it has completed a merger with Connect Healthcare. The two companies worked together for over 2 years before deciding to integrate their services.

Doctor.com works with health organizations to provide consolidated web services. It handles online listings and search engine optimization (SEO); combines physician reviews from various sites and social media networks to help providers handle their online reputations; and offers scheduling services and data warehousing. The company says its scheduling platforms are interoperable with “the most prominent” electronic health records (EHR) systems.

Connect Healthcare will bring provider directory tools, data analytics expertise, and data management capabilities to the relationship. Noel Coleman, president of Connect, called the post-merger company “the first end-to-end patient experience solution,” which would challenge “the multi-vendor status quo that many organizations struggle with.” Coleman will assume the title President of Enterprise Solutions for Doctor.com as a result of the merger.

Connect has pre-existing partnerships with several large health systems, including Brigham and Women’s Health in Boston, Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) Medicine. According to a statement, it stores data for 1.2 million providers on its proprietary platform.

Adrienne Steading, Director of Marketing and Digital Strategy at UAB Medicine, praised Connect Healthcare in a statement. "One of our goals was to provide further transparency to our patients — and this relationship made us the first healthcare organization in Alabama, and one of the first in the nation, to launch ratings and reviews on our website," she said.

Doctor.com CEO Andrei Zimiles said the merger serves his company’s “mission of enabling a more modern and efficient healthcare experience,” for all involved. "By fully integrating our capabilities under one roof, we are able to give our clients the most effective solution in the industry to manage their online presence, engage patients across the digital ecosystem, and monitor how these efforts improve their reputation and performance," he said.

His company, founded in 2012, raised $5 million in a Series A funding round earlier this year. The lead investor was Spring Mountain Capital, whose managing director Raymond Wong said today’s merger would enable Doctor.com to provide “the first truly holistic offering in a market plagued by fragmented solutions.”