It’s probably easier to make a reservation at your favorite restaurant online than it is to make an appointment with your doctor online. One service is hoping to change that.

Zocdoc (which is currently in beta in NY), is an online service that allows users to find a doctor or a dentist who accept his/her insurance plan, read doctor ratings and book an appointment with them online. The site guarantees that doctors will see you during the appointment time that you booked (although I wasn’t able to discern the nature of the guaranty, even in the Terms of Service). The service reminds users via email about their appointments. Zocdoc is free for users but charges doctors a fee for participating in the service.

The company just won the Forbes.com Boost Your Business in 2008 contest. The company does not disclose the number of doctors and dentists participating in the service. In the company’s Forbes.com contest entry, Zocdoc noted that their business has grown 50% every month since they launched the service in September 2007. They claimed to have a 5% market share of dentists in Manhattan and 1% of primary care physicians after one month of launching the specialty.

Karsten Vagner, Director of Communications for Zocdoc, also informed me that they have over 75,000 available appointments per month. I did a search for a primary care physicians in Manhattan and found several physicians who had availability the next business day.

Zocdoc search results page for primary care physicians

You need to sign up to book the appointment and enter a code to finalize the appointment. So far Zocdoc offers appointments with doctors in the following specialties: allergies (just added Mar 19), primary care, dermatology, ophthalmologist, ENT, orthopedist, OB/GYN, and dental.

I spoke to Dr. Boyan Hadjiev, Internist and Allergist in Manhattan, who has participated in Zocdoc since late 2008. He has found the company to be "easy to deal with" and the process of confirming appointments also relatively easy. The company provides a desktop application called the Zocdoc Alerter that tells him he has an appointment request and provides him the option to confirm, cancel or reschedule. If the doctor does not respond to the request within an hour, Zocdoc will phone the doctor to follow-up on the request. Dr. Hadjiev also said that, generally speaking, patients will be seen within 30 minutes of their scheduled Zocdoc appointment. He is happy with the current level of customer service and hopes that the quality does not suffer once they become bigger. Zocdoc did note in their Forbes.com Boost Your Business contest entry that they would be using the prize money to build out call centers, so the company is looking at building their customer service capacity.

Dr. Hadjiev, 35, is a “firm believer in technology” and is, therefore, a great early adopter for a service like Zocdoc. He carries a Blackberry and emails patients directly. He said,“I feel that I can provide a big service to my patients by making myself available electronically.”

Vagner confirmed that they would be adding a mobile version and launching another city, however, he could not provide a specific time frame.