1 Dialer launch
Doximity Dialer launched in 2016 as a physician calling product.
Launch evidence for the caller-ID product context.
Case study
The patient sees the office, not the cell phone
Built the identity layer that let a physician call a patient from their own phone while the patient saw the office number — so the call got answered and the physician's cell number stayed private. Trust had to be a product surface, not a compliance footnote.
9 years after I left, still carrying the call shielding the identity layer was built for.
-
300,000+
Calls on an average workday
Doximity's own figure, February 2026.
-
250+
Hospitals and health systems
Still carrying the call shielding built here.
-
9 years
Since I left
The 2016 identity layer, unchanged.
Context
Physicians need to reach patients but face a structural bind: call from the hospital desk phone, which means being at the hospital, or from a personal cell, which gives the number away for good — no boundary, no audit trail, and a safety risk. Most choose neither, and the call doesn't happen. When they do call from a cell phone, patients see 'Unknown Caller' and don't answer.
A product like that would never survive a hospital IT security review up front — no security team green-lights physicians placing outbound calls under an office number from a personal phone. 2
The decision
Proved it myself over a weekend: a working prototype placing outbound calls under an unverified caller ID, launched on that vendor deliberately. The boundary: the caller ID was the physician's own office number, on their own device, at their own choice — an identity they already legitimately held, with no clinical decision-making in the loop.
Hospital authorization came in stages, after physicians were already using it; the caller-ID route itself did not change while I was there. 2
Twilio-verified caller ID Not chosen
The legitimate path — Twilio required proving control of a number before displaying it as caller ID. Compliant, but slower to ship.
Unverified vendor caller ID Chosen
A vendor offered to set any caller ID without proof of control. Faster to ship, and the account-level identity verification was the protection layer underneath it.
The risk stayed with the person choosing, and every caller was an identity-verified Doximity member, so the platform knew who was behind the number.
| Hospital desk phone | Personal cell | Dialer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where you must be | At the hospital | Anywhere | Anywhere, on your own device |
| What the patient sees | The hospital's number | “Unknown Caller” — and the personal number, given away for good | The office number: “Dr. Smith's Office” |
| Audit trail | — | None | Audit-ready call logs and identity verification records |
| Whether the call is answered | — | Not answered; most physicians choose not to call at all | Answered |
What happened
Designed and shipped HIPAA-compliant verified caller ID and fallback workflows, making the clinician's office the visible, trusted identity on every outbound call.
Partnered with legal and hospital IT to clear EHR integration across multiple systems, including the Epic Haiku integration for one-tap verified calling inside the chart. 56
How hospital authorization was won
- Adopt — physicians using it on the vendor route, the risk staying with the person choosing
- Document — the HIPAA compliance policy, inherited from the 2014 messaging work
- Clear — hospital IT and the Epic Haiku integration, for a product already in use
Established the identity layer Dialer scaled on. The launch cohort converted: of 904 physicians emailed, 36 placed a call within days, and daily volume went from roughly ten to nearly seven hundred in the first ten days. While I was there, the iOS rating rose from 3.7 to 4.8 stars across the whole app portfolio. 34
| Identity | What it is | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
| Office | The clinician's office number — the preselected default | A number the clinician already holds |
| Back office | A back-office line, selectable per call | A number the clinician already holds |
| Mobile | The clinician's own mobile number, chosen deliberately | A number the clinician already holds |
| Ghost | An ephemeral number for the case where no owned number fits | 24 hours |
| Method | What it proves | Retained? |
|---|---|---|
| Medical email domain | Clinician status, by an address at a medical institution | — |
| DEA number | Clinician status, by the prescriber registration | No — used to verify, never stored |
| License photo | Clinician status, by a photograph of the license | — |
| Fax | Clinician status, by a faxed document | — |
What I’d keep
The sequence is where a principle I now design by was earned rather than contradicted — adoption may precede institutional approval only while the risk stays with the person choosing. When the risk is clinical, approval comes first.
When the call connects, a lab result gets communicated tonight instead of next week. A post-discharge follow-up reaches the patient before a complication sends them back to the ER. A physician who gets a biopsy result at 7pm can call from home — the patient sees the office number and answers, the personal boundary stays intact, and the diagnosis doesn't wait until morning.
The first sign it was working wasn't a metric: medical residents I'd gone to undergrad with told me they were getting more sleep at night — they could call patients from home with the office number instead of staying at the hospital to use the desk phone.
Sources
2 Launch rationale, in my words
I stated the product's rationale on Doximity's blog at launch: “Easier communication leads to more communication, and greater communication leads to better health outcomes.”
Dead at the original URL; cited to the Internet Archive snapshot. The title names the behavior the product replaced — physicians blocking caller ID with *67 and going unanswered.
3 Dialer call volume
Dialer carried more than 300,000 calls on an average workday last quarter, across 250+ hospitals and health systems.
Doximity's own reported figure for the quarter, published in its investor newsroom rather than in an SEC filing.
4 Telehealth provider volume
Over 300,000 unique active providers used Doximity telehealth tools in the quarter ended March 31, 2021.
Dated SEC filing, cited in place of undated company marketing copy. The filing's words: “We had over 300,000 unique active providers use our telehealth tools in the quarter ended March 31, 2021.” It defines a provider broadly — physicians, doctors of osteopathy, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and medical students.
5 Epic Haiku integration
Dialer integrated with Epic Haiku.
Public integration evidence for clinical-workflow reach.
6 Epic Showroom listing
Dialer appears in Epic Showroom.
Public listing evidence for the Epic integration.
Documents described, not republished
- Caller ID mapping The August 2016 MVP spec, when the product was still called CallPatient — tabulated above.
- The decision to defer phone verification In the same spec, four SMS-verification screens are struck through in red: identity was already established by the Doximity account behind the app, so verifying the handset again was cost without protection.
- Identity verification methods The annotated iOS spec, tabulated above.
- HIPAA policies, procedures, and white paper Written in 2014 for the messaging products.
Launch figures and the weekend prototype come from my launch review.