Once a platform owns enough of the patient journey while concurrently being operationally indispensable, optimisation to harness more profit just becomes logical.
If GPs and clinics are so annoyed at HotDoc why don’t they just leave?
HotDoc’s “telehealth on demand” service was news in 2025 (right before the recent acquisition by Potentia Capital). By bringing in telehealth-only external GPs to clinic booking pages they annoyed a heap of practices.
So why don’t clinics just swap to another software?
It’s complex.
HotDoc is marketed as a bookings platform but does a lot more. Deeply integrated out-of-the-box booking software is only one part of what they do, alongside recall management, forms, payments, bulk marketing and asynchronous requests. New patient acquisition has become a feature as the user base has expanded.
Patients now have muscle memory. Open the app. Use the widget. Same login, same flow.
HotDoc never white-labelled – when one company manufactures a product or service, and another company rebrands it as their own – and that’s not an oversight. Clinics paid the bills while they built a consumer brand. It’s smart – practices pay to build your brand identity among their patients.
Practices have become dependent on the automation and workflows. Over time, HotDoc stopped being a tool and became an operating layer of a practice – an efficiency solution in a world of manual processes that bolts into the operating system seamlessly.
But this comes at a cost.
Once you let a single platform control multiple critical flows, you’re no longer just buying Software as a Service. Now you’re outsourcing your leverage. Especially when that platform has its own alternative commercial interests.
HotDoc didn’t decide to compete with general practice and this wasn’t some grand betrayal arc.
I think it was an evolution – incremental decisions that made sense at the time. Start with bookings. Add reminders. Add forms. Add recalls. Add bulk comms. Add payments. Add asynchronous requests.
Each step solved a real problem for clinics and patients. Each step increased convenience. And each step pulled the platform a little closer to the centre of the patient journey.
At some point HotDoc stopped being practice-serving and evolved into a demand-owning intermediary. When unmet demand (and revenue) was left on the table it became logical to ensure customers (the general public) were served.
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And now a private equity owner – Potentia Capital – is coming on to the scene.
Private equity doesn’t buy businesses to preserve neutrality. They buy for leverage, scale, and optionality. When a platform already owns patient access, conditions behaviour, and is operationally indispensable to thousands of clinics, the commercial question becomes simple: where is there more profit that’s not being captured?
So how could we have avoided the situation that’s now evolving? We should have:
- Kept our own brand front and centre;
- Demanded white-labelled products;
- Avoided concentrating every critical flow in one vendor;
- Pushed PMS vendors harder to not outsource the front door.
Once a platform owns enough of the patient journey while concurrently being operationally indispensable, optimisation to harness more profit just becomes logical.
And by the time you feel it, leaving is really hard.
Dr Max Mollenkopf is a GP and practice owner in Newcastle, NSW.
This article was first published on Dr Mollenkopf’s LinkedIn feed. Read the original here.