Paging ZocDoc for the future of medicine

This New Year's column celebrates change, or at least acknowledges the quickening pace and the grinding inevitability of it, and that it will come in 2013 in both clever and obvious ways.

For me, as the year wound down, I got a clear inkling of something to come because I had a cold that I couldn't shake. Urged by the young people around me — my own doctor was on vacation — I used ZocDoc the other day.

I entered my particulars: my ZIP code, my malady, my insurance. And bingo, I had my choice of doctors in the vicinity and available appointments that day.

I chose an ear-nose-and-throat man a 10-minute walk from my house and picked an appointment slot that very hour.

I told the doctor, an affable young man, that this was my first ZocDoc appointment, and I detected that he would rather not be reminded that practicing medicine had come to this. But I had my prescription and, to boot, got my ears cleaned, in 15 minutes.

This is certainly not the first time in my almost 20 years of Internet use of knowing that I had just crossed a threshold.

But this experience is up there, and it seems worthwhile to record the exact moment of being aware of the sense of behaviors about to be altered, expectations reordered, processes redefined and, not to be too grand, human trajectory recali-brated.

ZocDoc, turning health care into a one-click experience, upends traditional medical practice, the power equation in the doctor-patient relationship, the consumer-provider paradigm, the current payment models and likely everything about the health care debate — in a sense, the entire modern conversation.

If not ZocDoc — if it turns out to be Myspace — then the next iteration.

But the cat, or the medical system, is surely out of the bag.

We are still, even after all the upheaval and the reinventions of our time, not truly appreciative enough, not suitably awed, neither in a psychological nor opportunistic sense, by change when it confronts us — indeed, slaps us in the face.

Years from now, you may recall this column and its advice that we all should drop everything and plunge into remaking medicine — that epochal money pit and gold mine.

Anyway, as should be evident to everyone, the following is now going to happen:

The total convenience and demystification of the market is going to make ZocDoc irresistible to everybody with an immediate casual medical issue.

Its transparency will foster cutthroat competition and inevitable price shopping and price cutting.

Not only will prices fall, but doctors will begin to compete with insurance itself — all non-surgical attention for less than you'd pay for anything but catastrophic illness. In other words, the individual mandate will be obsolete before we even finish arguing about it.

Surgeons join ZocDoc, too. Everybody joins ZocDoc. This includes all variety of para-medical professionals — physical therapists, acupuncturists, podiatrists, ambitious nurses, dental hygienists, anybody with the vaguest licensing requirements — extending the marketplace and competition.

Undoubtedly, there are reviews and ratings and all manner of Yelp-like chatter and advice, meaning ZocDoc itself becomes something very close to your primary physician.

In no time, ZocDoc, or whatever mightier competitor emerges in the space, will itself become the most important brand and the unifying principle of the health care system — with unchecked powers and the ability to bend the system to its own advantage.

But the sad truth is you, even having read this column with its unambiguous entreaty that we all should seek our fortunes overthrowing the health care system, will not have dropped everything, and will only become aware of ZocDoc's transformative power, and the opportunities to profit from health care's ridiculous inefficiencies, well after ZocDoc, or something like it, has become a monolith and monopolistic presence.

I spend an inordinate amount of time among colleagues in the book business listening to them complain about Amazon, which has upended their business — if not destroying it, stealing it.

(Many book people are so violent in their feelings about Amazon that they refuse to buy anything from it — and shun others in the business who do.)

Quite simply, the people who once controlled the book business no longer do. Of course, they were all present when Amazon came along, and all fully aware that their business was inept, inefficient and infuriating — and silly, too. But they did nothing.

Anyone could have been Amazon. Everybody should have been Amazon.

In a better, more ambitious world, there would now be several more Amazons.

There is, I fear, a developing idea, that the world is divided between most of us and the gifted or well-connected or technically adroit few who will mastermind the next big thing.

Trust me, the latter are, by whatever circumstances, just opportunists, which we all should be.

We know change is coming — we really do know it and can invariably see it — yet, we stand there slack-jawed and gob-smacked, letting adventure, opportunity, even immortality in our professions, pass us by.

This may not be an original New Year's message, but it is a sage and hopeful one: Seize the day.

Otherwise, of course, it seizes you.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com, and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.