New York City-based Doctor.com, a company that helps physicians manage their online presence and book appointments, has just announced its merger with Connect Healthcare, a company which specializes in physician directories and data management, under the Doctor.com brand for an undisclosed sum. 

“Merging with them and bringing them into the Doctor.com family, so to speak, allows us to layer on everything that we do … for these enterprise customers,” Andrei Zimiles, CEO of Doctor.com, told MobiHealthNews. “What is really awesome about this merger is that there are no redundancies or negative impacts for anyone. All of the [Connect Healthcare] team came over and all of their customers became shared customers. Nothing changed in terms of the service… but [the Connect Healthcare customers] now get access  to a whole bunch of other things from the Doctor.com side, like online scheduling across the web.”

Zimiles said Doctor.com was the first holistic platform that serves the market end to end. The team specializes in making doctors discoverable on the internet by partnering with sites such as Yelp, as well as social media channels. The website also lets patients book appointments online. This merger could help the company develop some of its provider directories and reputation monitoring abilities, according to Zimiles, who noted that these are some of Connect Healthcare’s strengths. 

Connect Healthcare provides data management and clinician searches for more than 200 hospitals and health plan clients, including Brigham an Women’s Hospital and UC San Diego Health. Currently Connect Healthcare stores the data of 1.2 million providers and powers the directory information for 7.5 million unique users. 

"The integration of Doctor.com's pioneering reputation management and universal scheduling solutions with Connect Healthcare's proven data warehousing and provider directory tools creates the first end-to-end patient experience solution, challenging the multi-vendor status quo that many organizations struggle with,” Noel Coleman, president of Connect Healthcare, said in a statement. “By joining forces, we can help our clients tackle some of the greatest challenges when endeavoring to improve the customer experience across the patient journey."

The merger brings the Doctor.com team to a little over 160 employees. Coleman will now join Doctor.com as president of enterprise solutions. 

Doctor.com was founded in 2012. Earlier this year the company raised $5 million in a funding round led by SpringMountain Capital. At the time Zimiles said the funding would help support the expansion of the company’s healthcare marketing automation platform. The latest merger was also supported by SpringMountain Capital.

"The success of each company can be attributed to a profound understanding of the complexities of healthcare data systems as well as the consumer web,” Raymond Wong, managing director  of SpringMountain Capital, said in a statement about the merger. “Through this merger, Doctor.com is able to provide clients with the first truly holistic offering in a market plagued by fragmented point solutions."

The company plans to keep the Atlanta headquarters of Connect Healthcare. Doctor.com also has offices in Silicon Valley. Zimiles said that oftentimes in mergers companies try to engineer ways to cut costs and find redundancies, but he said that this merger isn’t like that. 

“The single most exciting thing is seeing the two teams come together,” said Zimiles. “It's one of those deals where it is purely additive.”