Scraping Data From Every Single ZocDoc Doctor

Jake Bialer

Posted on Feb 23, 2017

The skills the author demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.

Introduction

Data shows internet start-ups have continuously replaced the herculean task of picking up the phone and calling an actual human with a few taps on the phone. Instead of calling a cab, you tap a button and one arrives. Instead of calling for late night pizza, tap a few times and the order is on its way. Founded in 2007, ZocDoc allows patients to avoid the horror of a phone call and book their doctors appointment with a few taps on their phone.

As a lazy millennial, I’ve always appreciated ZocDoc’s convenience and use it for the majority of my medical booking. ZocDoc allows me to book doctors based on other patient’s reviews, easily reschedule or cancel, and fill out forms beforehand by my appointment.

Curious about the size of their business, the best doctors, and basically everything about their service, I set to work web scraping every single doctor on their site. After spending 95 hours scraping approximately 1.2 million doctors on their site, I discovered that most of doctors on their site are placeholders. See, for example, this profile. ZocDoc has populated its site with placeholder profiles via data from the American Board Of Medical Specialties. After filtering out these placeholders, there are 47,363 doctors on their site. Let's dig in.

The Business of ZocDoc

Following the logic used here, given about 47k doctors on their site and ZocDoc's annual fee of (as of 2016) $3000/year annual fee from doctors that use its service, we can roughly estimate their yearly revenue to be about 141 million/year.

In 2015, in a Series D funding round, ZocDoc raised $130 million at a $1.8 billion valuation. Thus, following the 2015 valuation, they were valued in 2015 at 14x of their current revenue.

Reviews

ZocDoc has 1.88 million total reviews.

A full review consists of text and a rating in three rating categories: overall, bedside manner, and wait time. For overall reviews, 85% are five-star reviews, 9% are four-star reviews, 2% are three-star reviews, 2% are two-star reviews, and 2% are one-star reviews.

Bedside manner reviews following a similar distribution.

While still mostly positive, wait time reviews are a little less positive with more reviews under 5 relative to the other review categories.

Bias of Zoc Doc?

So ZocDoc's review system appears biased towards positive reviews. Why?

One explanation is ZocDoc patients are really happy with their Doctors. Patients have just given good reviews and that's that.

Another explanation could be their moderation policy. ZocDoc requires patients to visit a doctor in order to review the doctor and all reviews are moderated. They remove reviews if they contain profanity, personal information, pricing specifics, accuracy of treatment or diagnosis info, and promotional content. This moderation criteria — particularly profanity, pricing specifics, and accuracy of treatment — seems biased against negative reviews. If you swear at your overpriced doctor who misdiagnosed you, your review will not make it passed their moderation.

Another explanation is ZocDoc or doctors are artificially inflating their positive reviews with fake positive reviews. Fake reviews are combatted through moderation and requiring patients to see a doctor in order to review a doctor. However, fake reviews are common across the internet and fake reviews are certainly possible by a determined actor.

ZocDoc has a financial incentive to keep their reviews mostly positive. The doctors pay them to use ZocDoc. If a doctor gets mostly negative reviews, then they will be unhappy, not get patients through the service, and eventually leave.

What is in the reviews?

Of all those reviews, 1.19 (64%) million do not have any text. This leaves 36%, or 685k reviews, with text. The text reviews follow a similar pattern the non-text reviews. The vast majority of the overall ratings for reviews with text, 88% (599,779), are five-star reviews. Only 2% (14,672) of text reviews have one star.

We can look at some of the most common bigrams, two-word combinations, to identify patterns in the top five and one star reviews. These bigrams have been filtered for common words to reveal interesting words.

What are common bigrams in five-star reviews?

Below are some of the top bigrams. Patients like doctors who answer questions, take time, make them feel comfortable with friendly staff.

Bigram	Frequency
highly recommend	57,866
answers questions	31,846
took time	25966
made feel	22,748
recommend dr	22,709
feel comfortable	21,e555
bedside manner	21,331
explains everything	18,174
great doctor	16,589
takes time	16,328
office staff	16,053
wait time	14,561
staff friendly	13,455
visit dr	13,056
definitely recommend	12,918
make feel	12,439

Data on the common bigrams in one-star reviews

The following are the most common bigrams from one-star reviews. People seem to dislike doctors who keep them in waiting in wait room and waste time. Again, these top bigrams are most likely biased by ZocDoc's moderation policy which prohibits reviews that complain about price or accuracy of diagnosis.

Bigram	Frequency
go back	1287
will never	918
waste time	910
wait hour	872
never go	804
call back	693
bedside manner	680
front desk	644
doctor office	632
come back	626
see doctor	604
ask question	578
wait room	562
wait time	540
another doctor	452
office staff	439

Data on Doctor's Locations

ZocDoc was started and is headquartered in New York City. So, not surprisingly, New York state is the home to the most ZocDoc doctors with 13,053 followed by Texas with 4,569 and California with 4,454. The top five states for ZocDoc doctors (New York, Texas, California, Florida, and New Jersey) account for 60% of the doctors on ZocDoc.

Doctors By State

state	count	percent
NY	13,053	27
TX	4,569	10
CA	4,454	9
FL	3,495	7
NJ	3,108	7
IL	3,033	6
MD	1,754	4
VA	1,301	3
GA	1,240	3
AZ	1,227	3

Cities

New York city, Brooklyn, and the Bronx account for 15% of the doctors on Zocdoc. Other major cities include Chicago, Houston, and Washington D.C.

Doctors By City

city_state	count	percent
NEW YORK, NY	6998	11
BROOKLYN, NY	2022	3
CHICAGO, IL	1204	2
HOUSTON, TX	1068	2
WASHINGTON, DC	683	1
BRONX, NY	522	1
DALLAS, TX	503	1
SAN ANTONIO, TX	492	1
AUSTIN, TX	438	1
MINEOLA, NY	423	1

How Often Are ZocDoc Doctors Available?

On the night of Feb 11, I collected data on doctor availability for the next forty-five days (which includes 32 weekdays) of all the doctors on ZocDoc. The median ZocDoc doctor has 107 appointment slots available in the next 45 days or about 2.3 a weekday.

Data on types of doctors on ZocDoc

ZocDoc is the home to many different types of Doctors. The most popular doctor is a dentist (14% of all doctors), followed by an internist (9% of all doctors), and a family physician (7% of all doctors).

What Doctor Names Are Over-Represented By Doctors?

By comparing the first names of doctors against the most common U.S. baby names from 1951 to 1992 (25 yr old to 65 yr old, a rough range for when doctors were born) and filtering for first names with at least 20 doctors on ZocDoc , we see names that are more common with doctors vs the general U.S. born population. The top five names are Russian: Dmitry, Inna, Yelena, Alla, and Igor. Perhaps not popular baby names during the Cold War.

Doctor First Name	Baby Names Count	Zoc Doc Count	Ratio
Dmitry	7	21	3.00
Inna	19	33	1.74
Yelena	122	36	0.30
Alla	97	27	0.28
Igor	187	42	0.22
Irina	362	56	0.16
Babak	256	23	0.09
Reza	419	28	0.07
Syed	1177	53	0.05
Rajesh	588	23	0.04
Vijay	712	26	0.04
Sanjay	935	33	0.04
Seema	800	27	0.03
Anil	801	26	0.03
Sunil	738	23	0.03
Boris	1941	45	0.02
Ravi	1401	29	0.02
Vladimir	1554	32	0.02
Muhammad	1949	40	0.02
Maryam	1211	24	0.02

Doctor Languages

Some ZocDoc doctors list the languages they speak on their profile page. After English, which is by far the most popular language spoken by doctors, here are the other languages ZocDoc doctors speak in U.S.

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About Author

Jake Bialer

During the past eight years, I’ve worked as a full-stack developer, data analyst, and journalist. I’ve a track record of finding unique datasets through web scraping and using them to help companies solve key business problems. My NYCDSA...

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Fantastic analysis and it is really useful to me as I am building a competitor to ZocDoc and it's going to be only 99.99 a month.

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CARL LONEY September 23, 2019

If you look at the reviews from vitals, healthgrades and google, the reviews often don't match with the data from zocdoc. The thing with zocdoc is, they are often flooded with fake positive reviews that people overlook the negative (real) ones. I was looking at 1 specific doctor today, and she was getting on avg of 2 star reviews on yelp, gugle, and healthgrades, while the had a 4.5 on zocdoc.

Camila B. February 12, 2019

Great analysis!

Taylor February 12, 2019

They absolutely scrub reviews. It's something like any review with a rating below 4 stars is automagically withheld. I think it's still possible to get it posted, but they require some additional verification, a phone interview, etc., a barrier large enough that a normal person doesn't bother with it.

Taylor Archibald February 12, 2019

Notta Victim September 12, 2018

As a physician with an established busy practice, I chose to pass on ZocDoc when it was first pitched to me because it basically amounted to paying for referrals and because it prioritized patients who did not present from established referral sources and were likely to "no show". Of course, they stacked their site with fake positive reviews in order to keep the patients coming and to keep their customers happy. Many of my colleagues decided to go with ZocDoc and considered it a good deal for $300/mo initially, however over time they came to over rely on ZocDoc for all of their reception duties and are now crying uncle while ZocDoc attempts to convert them to a $35 per patient referral fee with charges taken even for no shows. I am glad I grew my practice organically and have never had to rely on a site like ZocDoc which requires kickbacks for referrals.

Geeta Poptani March 25, 2018

I am one of those people who has worked in their back end office and seen how it works. All reviews get to the site. On it the profanities and other stuff are removed. The rest is kept. Every patient who visits writes the reviews and those are typed out by the back end.

Steve October 20, 2017

I tried ZocDoc for a time. I am a gastroenterologist in Ilinois. I had 3 appointments scheduled over a year through the service, 2 didn't show, and 1 that came didn't need specialty services. Then Insaw that ZocDoc was putting a list of other physicians that the patient might want to see on the page that was my practice. So, lousy referral experience and the company advertised my competitors on the page that was supposed to drive patients to me. What were they thinking. You may be interested in the following. After a few months of no referrals I called to cancel. They offered to leave my profile up for free! Well, I continued that for another 6 months, but after about 9-12 months I decided they were a negative on my practice for he above reasons, so I demanded that they drop my name entirely. So, I suspect a lot of he doctors on the site are not paying for the service at all.

Sam June 25, 2017

Hello Jake, Is this data available online on GitHub or is the code for scraping data available on Github? If possible, can you please share me the link

AdamP March 28, 2017

Hi. Looks like you put the same bigram table twice. Cheers.

Apna March 3, 2017

Wonderful analysis. I'd like you to share some details about how you scraped data from Zocdoc's website. Thanks.

Scraping Data From Every Single ZocDoc Doctor

The skills the author demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.