I’d like to welcome Dave Chase, new THCB contributor who’s writing about the Carnage in Health IT.Go read his provocative article then sneak back to hear from me why he’s wrong! Love ‘em to death but the RockHealth crowd is the kids on the outside–the only slightly more seasoned Health 2.0 companies (of whom Aavdo is one) know that they have to work with the system to get going. Even the ones focused on consumer end users (patients or doctors) like Sermo & American Well have been making alliances and getting customers in the old HC world since before day 1. And in fact the carnage in Health 2.0 has been very limited compared to (say) the consumer Web world of the early 2000s. Why? because they all started much smaller and most didnt rise so much money but went looking for customers–in the old HC world. Which is why change is slower.

Finally I love ZocDoc, but equating raising money with market success is a stretch. Unlike OpenTable which only had to drop a booking system into restaurants, there’s lots of different systems that an appt booking system has to integrate with in a doc’s office. And those systems have their own vendors who are competing directly with ZocDoc’s features.

And of course while I might want to go to lots of different and new restaurants all the time, I’m likely to want to stick to only a few doctors–once I find the ones I want. So I’m not sure a consumer wants a one stop place for every possible doctor, and it’s possible that a doctor doesn’t want just a one point solution for appointments. At any rate it’s damn early in the game and I guarantee you that despite the very encouraging progress and the boatload of roubles they just got, Cyrus and his team at ZocDoc know that they’re in for a long ground war and have not declared victory and gone home yet.