ZocDoc, the 'OpenTable of doctor's appointments,' comes to Android

ZocDoc, a web-based service for finding doctors and booking appointments without making a single phone call, launched its official Android app on Monday, and it is freely available for download in the Android Market.

ZocDoc is frequently compared to restaurant reservation service OpenTable because, well, it's really the same thing, but instead of booking dinners, the user is booking medical or dental appointments.

In the Android app, users select the type of doctor they're looking for, the type of appointment they'd like to make, their zip code, the date they'd like an appointment, and the name of their insurance provider, if applicable. The iPhone version of ZocDoc was first released back in January of 2011, and it currently drives about 7% of all the appointments the service pulls in. The company expects Android will help significantly increase that.

Like OpenTable, however, ZocDoc is only useable in select American cities; and the list of supporting cities is still short at present. So far, it only includes some of the country's biggest cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC, but the people behind the service say there are 4.9 million available appointments at any given time with general practitioners and specialists.