Why AI Could Finally Fix Healthcare Access | Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz

Why is booking a doctor's appointment still so difficult, and can AI finally change that? Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz argues that the real problem isn't finding doctors, but connecting patients to accurate availability and making appointments bookable wherever they start their search. Oliver joins a16z General Partner Julie Yoo to discuss how Zocdoc spent nearly 20 years building the infrastructure behind online scheduling, and why it's now opening that technology to AI agents, insurers, and other platforms. They explore Zocdoc's partnership with Gemini, why patients shouldn't be locked into a single healthcare platform, and how surfacing last-minute availability can reduce appointment wait times from weeks to days. They also discuss what happens when AI becomes a new front door to healthcare and why Oliver believes the future of Zocdoc extends far beyond its own app.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Erik Torenberg?

  In travel, you book a flight. In e-commerce, you buy a product. But in healthcare, simply booking an appointment can still take weeks. In this episode, A16Z general partner Julie Yu sits down with Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz to discuss why healthcare scheduling remains so difficult and how AI could change that. Oliver explains how Zocdoc built the infrastructure to connect patients with doctors across hundreds of scheduling systems and why the company is now making that technology available to AI agents and other platforms. They also discuss Zocdoc's partnership with Gemini, why no single company should own the front door to healthcare, and how better scheduling can help patients see doctors in days rather than weeks. And ultimately, what changes when finding and booking

• 0:45Erik Torenberg?

  the right doctor becomes as easy as booking a flight?

• 0:51Julie Yoo?

  I am so excited to be here with Oliver Kharraz, who is the CEO of Zocdoc. Oliver and I go way back. You and I are kindred spirits in both having tried to solve a lot of similar problems in healthcare over the years and, dare I say, decades almost. And I feel like we competed at times. We probably should have just partnered with each other, but it's been fun to share notes with you as Zocdoc has continued to evolve. And arguably, Zocdoc is one of the few companies in health tech that has truly built like a household iconic name for itself. So huge kudos for doing that. Maybe, Oliver, we can start with you just providing the audience with an update. What is Zocdoc today? And how has it evolved the most over the last several years that you've been building the business?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you, Julie. Good to be here. And in fact, it's been decades, but it feels like days. And I always enjoyed learning from you. So a lot of your listeners will probably think of Zocdoc as a destination website where they go and can find a doctor that accepts their insurance and then they'll book an appointment right there and then. And that's something that we of course still do. But what is new now is that we take this infrastructure that we have built that enables that marketplace and we make it available to third parties. So whether you are a payer, you're an AI platform, you have a consumer audience, you can now give them the ability to schedule their doctors seamlessly, no matter where they start the journey.

• 2:15Julie Yoo?

  The genesis of this conversation actually was you and I just texting each other after I put a tweet out there a few weeks ago saying tongue in cheek that nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and the provider directory problem. And you and I have both tried to solve this problem from different angles, but it still persists, right? I mean, that's part of why I wrote it was we continue to encounter, whether it's our startup companies who are trying to build in this area and themselves ask the question like, why hasn't this been solved? Incumbents who also struggle to maintain precise information about who their providers are, who's doing what, who's bookable, who takes what insurance, et cetera. What's your view on why this problem has persisted? What is the fundamental incentive that we failed as an industry to align

• 2:59Julie Yoo?

  that you think is the biggest blocker to having a true golden record for every licensed medical practitioner in this country?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think actually the problem is to a large extent solved. If we look at what we're doing, we have the ability to schedule into the providers that are connected to us. We are of data that's more than 99% accurate, which compares quite favorably with your average insurance directory. And the reason in the golden knot here was actually enabling the transaction. When you put out a provider directory, frequently you're in the business of publishing the Encyclopedia Britannica, right? By the time you're able to really put it out there and present it to patients, it's already out of date. You're constantly chasing the problem. Once you have the transaction, it's much more like Wikipedia, right? Every incremental transaction

• 3:50Speaker 02

  actually validates the information you have. You make any mistake, you make exactly once and then you know what's going in. Now, of course, as you know, the actual transactability and the ability for a patient to book seamlessly was an extremely hard problem to solve. There are hundreds of different EHRs. There's tens of thousands of insurance plans that need to be mapped. There are many, many different ways to work in this, different workflows and different practices, different specialties. And it turns into this Tetris game that we needed to solve. And it took us 20 years to get to where we are today, that this infrastructure is available for anyone who wants to plug in and to provide that experience for their patients.

• 4:32Julie Yoo?

  Okay, that's amazing. So that is a bold claim. And I'm so glad that you are confident that we have solved this problem. Can we actually double click on that a little bit, Oliver? When I think back to the way that we approached this problem at Chiris, we largely, just to abstract out the problem a little bit, there's three buckets of data that matter about a doctor. There's the basic demographic information, who is the doctor, what are they credentialed in, what insurance they take, organizational affiliations, et cetera. There's a second bucket of data, which is their kind of practice data. What do they actually do clinically in practice? And maybe even things like who do they refer to or who refers to them, things of that sort. And then the third, which you alluded to already, is what is their actual availability? And that means wiring into the source of truth, like scheduling systems and understanding what the capacity of the system is

• 5:17Julie Yoo?

  and how to effectively route. Can you just walk us through, what is the approach? Like, do you have to take a unique approach to each of those buckets? Which one is the hardest to solve? Where have you had the most success in doing something that you think is novel relative to everyone else who's tried their hand at this problem over the years?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think problem one is distinct from the others, right? This is information that doesn't change as often. Where did they go to med school? Like, where is their practice located? That seems to be the most tractable problem and that's why most people focus there. The second two problems are related and you can both extract them from the EHR, but they are very, very difficult to standardize. I'll give you sort of an idea. Yes, you can write integrations to the EHRs, which we do. We have them out of the box for 175 different EHRs plus. But then they're being used very differently. I'll give you one complete example. When we first got started, we realized that there was a practice where we constantly got cancellations from the office manager

• 6:19Speaker 02

  that said that this doctor isn't available at the time we wanted to book the patient into. And we couldn't figure out why because the copy of the calendar and the practice in our copy seemed identical. And we brought all the smartest people at Zocdoc in a room. I brought them pizza, I walked their dogs. They couldn't figure it out. So I sat next to the office manager. And what I realized is that sometimes the doctor would walk out and say, hey, I'm out next Friday. And the office manager would actually take a post-it note and attach that to their monitor instead of going into the EHR. Well, once you know these things are happening, you can solve for that. Math is your friend. And it turns out that just one example, there were literally 1,000.1% solutions

• 7:03Speaker 02

  that we had to figure out to make the EHR integration for scheduling truly accurate. And that took us several years to do. And I think many folks just got frustrated with this task and we were stubborn enough to persist. And as a result, we have now gotten enough information about how EHRs actually use to answer question two and three that you laid out based on a single integration into their EHR.

• 7:27Julie Yoo?

  We used to joke that 3M was our biggest competitor because of post-it notes.

• 7:32Julie Yoo?

  The other kind of unique distinction that Zocdoc has relative to a lot of others in this space is the fact that you've always been consumer aligned. And to the point I made earlier, you guys are now a household brand. I think consumers do view Zocdoc as a go-to place when they do need a doctor's appointment, as opposed to many companies, including mine, which took much more of a B2B approach and aligned with health systems, provider organizations, et cetera. To what extent do you think that played into your ability to crack this nut uniquely and differently and better than others who are going sort of through the system, so to speak? And can you give some examples of maybe where your consumer-driven approach was ultimately the thing that got providers to change behavior or that helped solve this problem in a unique way?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think this speaks to the fact that we just firmly believe that everything has to start with the patient. And when the patient wins, everyone wins. The provider wins, Zocdoc wins. And so that's a mindset that we brought to the providers we partnered with. And it's interestingly not a mindset that is easily reinforced by a lot of the other software they use. There is a general walled garden preference in healthcare frequently, where the idea is that we own the front door to care, that we own the patient. And the reality is that that's a flawed premise. Because healthcare isn't like a building where you lure the patient in and you slam the door or shut behind them.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  It's a lot more like a city, right? And the patient walks the city and depending on what their need is at this current moment, they might knock on different doors. They might go to an urgent care center. Their kid is sick or they might look for the most specialized doctor. If they have a rare disease or someone who can be there for the journey if they have a chronic condition. And so you need to acknowledge that you need to open all the doors in order for this to truly work. And then you will sort of take learnings that you would never be able to get from a single EHR because you're focused around the problem the way the patient sees it.

• 9:33Julie Yoo?

  Okay, and just to sort of reinforce that somewhat contrarian view, Oliver, I think the notion that no single party should own the front door and in fact, there is no single front door. We should enable care no matter where the patient wants to go. It's somewhat at odds with kind of the belief that I think has been long held by people in the system, which is that if you think about it that way, you might sacrifice some of the coordination that is necessary to ensure that a patient is getting the right care at the right time, longitudinally, to a point that they actually resolve whatever health issues that they have. How do you sort of reconcile those two points of view? And maybe if you could even share, what do you actually see in your data? You guys have probably millions and billions of data points about how patients themselves view loyalty to a provider and in what circumstances do they actually get better care

• 10:17Julie Yoo?

  if they are looking at a holistic set of provider options as opposed to just being tethered to any one health system or any one provider affiliation? Can you just speak to some examples of why you believe what you believe?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so first of all, let's just reset how everything else works in our everyday experience, right? In e-commerce, you buy. In travel, you book. In healthcare, you're blocked. That is very, very unique. We make it really difficult for patients to do business with us. And that's not what patients actually want. When we see patient behavior, they typically check multiple providers. They spend a lot of time going through the reviews and understanding what these providers went through. This is a very high consideration sort of engagement relative to other things they do in their lives. Narrowing the aperture of what is what you offer to them and making it hard for them to engage with you

• 11:12Speaker 02

  just lets you fall off the radar. And so But on the flip side, once they make that commitment, we see actually extremely high loyalty to the providers that they go to. A roughly seventy-five to eighty percent rebooking rate with the same provider when a patient books in the same specialty. So it speaks to the fact that it's not really necessary to lock them in through the systems you build. You will gain their loyalty just by being a good doctor to them.

• 11:42Julie Yoo?

  Yeah, and it's interesting to have this conversation in light of where we are today, right? We're a few weeks into the sort of like the era of instinct and muse and all of these consumer agents that, you know, people are now using to do exactly the types of things that you're describing, Oliver, booking appointments, you know, travel, restaurants, and of course, inevitably, their healthcare experiences. You guys announced a partnership with Gemini along these lines where agentically people can use your platform to, you know, more efficiently get to the right doctors and book appointments. What's your view and maybe like, has anything changed, I guess, fundamentally about how you view the role of Zocdoc in this era of personal consumer co-pilot agents? And also the role that you play on behalf of your provider customers in terms of how they,

• 12:26Julie Yoo?

  they can reconcile like all the inbound that I'm sure they're anticipating getting from all these tools?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for sure, I think if I think about the role of AI here, it's really making patient engagement go through the roof. They get much more personalized information, it feels much more specific, and it's much more likely to lead to action. And that's where Zocdoc comes in, right? The AI can give you the information, but Zocdoc can make it actually actionable so that you can go see a provider. So that is, you know, a dynamic that is just beginning, but already very, very strong. Now, AI, as you mentioned, we are partnering with Gemini. We're certainly here to partner with anyone who wants to have that immediate bookability.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And what's interesting about this is that the number of sort of quote-unquote "front doors" is really exploding because there are lots of different agents, there's a lot of different, you know, modalities on how consumers can use them. And for a doctor, it's really inconceivable to sort of hunt them all down and try to connect to them one-off. And so our promise to the providers, do a single integration with Zocdoc. We then distribute your availability to all the different platforms that are out there and sort of take that distribution worry off your hands. Our role in this is really just that of healthcare access infrastructure, right?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  We don't need every booking to happen on zocdoc.com or our app. We just want to make sure that whatever door the patient is knocking on, that door actually opens.

• 14:08Julie Yoo?

  Yeah, and the interesting question that arises from that dynamic, first of all, that's great to hear that you are, you know, into it. Like, I think there's a lot of companies right now that serve sort of this marketplace type role in a variety of industries who are taking different approaches and having very different reactions to how they deal with these agents. So I agree that there's a huge opportunity for you to become the sort of the utility layer to all this activity. How do you think about choice? And, you know, I think what you guys, today you have a UI, you have an app, like I use your app, and I, as a consumer, can apply my own agency to determining what my preferences are. If I have seven choices, you know, how do I rank order those choices and pick the ultimate one that I think is best for me?

• 14:51Julie Yoo?

  As you, you know, kind of, as the role of Zocdoc goes more towards like that sort of the middleware layer, the utility layer, obviously, you lose some of that interaction that might be considered like a fairness layer in some ways to the consumer. What's your rubric for how you think about like routing? You know, like, are you guys applying judgment to the routing layer where if your system brings back twelve choices, you apply, you know, some preference on behalf of the consumer? Or have you thought through ways that you could actually still surface that level of agency to the end user?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  So we have always sort of given all the agency to the end user, to the patient, right? Like, we present the options the patient chooses. And in our view, you know, these AI agents are just going to be extensions of the patients, right? They, you know, obviously, every agent might have their own way to solve that, but they probably gather the preferences or the decision criteria of the patient in some way and then apply it. We really look at that as one thing, the patient and the agent. We don't differentiate between these two things. It will serve them both, you know, whatever options are available to them, and then they decide what's the best match.

• 16:07Julie Yoo?

  Maybe can you speak, Oliver, to a little bit to how the supply side of your marketplace has evolved over time? I know initially, and this was, you know, again, years ago, a lot of the focus was on kind of the lower acuity specialty areas like primary care, urgent care, you know, even dental, you know, things of that sort. And it was just culturally more challenging to get the true specialists aligned in a way that they would play nice on platforms like this. Has that changed? Like, do you actually see specialist practices getting on board with kind of open scheduling practices? And, you know, what changed or what did you guys do? Or what do you think has changed in the market to drive that evolution?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  So we've been pretty broad for a while, actually. Now, obviously, you know, many more patients go to a primary care doctor or dentist than to a neurosurgeon. That's the case for sure, but, you know, we have two hundred and fifty different specialties on the platform, and all of them are being booked. I just came out of a meeting where I learned that we have literally tens of thousands of oncology bookings going through Zocdoc in New York City alone. So this is very broad from, hey, I just need to go see someone or I have a dental issue or mental health issue, to I need to see someone very self-specialized. And, you know, all of that is available on Zocdoc, and it's available much sooner than if you got on the phone and played scheduling Tetris with an office manager.

• 17:35Julie Yoo?

  How have they, how does this relate to, you know, kind of the argument in the past, especially with, you know, kind of high-end specialty practices like oncology or what have you, was that there's a great deal of clinical qualification that needs to happen before you, you know, take that precious slot and, you know, give it to a certain patient? You know, what are you seeing there in terms of how, again, the providers are just, you know, playing in that zone? Like, are they now comfortable with fully self-service, you know, kind of selection on the consumer's part? Are there AI tools that they can use to, you know, sort of implement some of what used to be these like really rigid scheduling rules that were largely baked into the EHR platforms? You know, what do you think is like AI-proof in this environment?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  So I think, you know, it has moved in both directions, right? Both the technology that helps patients filter down providers that are a good match for them has improved by leaps and bounds over the years. And then providers have also gotten increasingly confident because they actually realize that, you know, the vast majority of patients have pretty good judgment on their own whether they should see this provider many times. They're essentially acting on a referral that has been given by them from their primary care doc that has the sort of ongoing relationship, and they just use Zocdoc because it's a tool for them to really screen the market and pre-meet providers that they might want to see on the profile.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  So that is, that's something that has, you know, just been getting better and better over the last years. And it's, you know, I'm sure going to further improve through AI, but it is not been a blocker for us, you know, even predating the release of this latest series of AI tools.

• 19:26Julie Yoo?

  You know, one of the big areas of activity that we see a lot of, which is in some ways like a holy grail, you know, problem set for entrepreneurs is, you know, who will build the sort of next generation AI-native, you know, practice management and EHR, you know, platform? And I know Zocdoc has already kind of started to vertically integrate into, you know, certain capabilities and components of what traditionally has been known more as like a practice management system zone, but are natural extensions of the work that you're already doing from top-of-funnel perspective. What's been your, you know, what's your vision there? Like, are you guys, do you view yourselves ultimately over time becoming more of a system of record for things like scheduling and other, you know, administrative capabilities within the practice?

• 20:08Julie Yoo?

  Or, you know, how do you see yourself playing a role vis-à-vis existing platforms and, you know, very incumbent, like very entrenched systems in that universe?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, look, we're driven by what the patient wants and what works for the patient. And obviously, we think of ourselves as an entity that, you know, is very consumer-oriented in a space that's generally not. And so areas where we can make it, can take friction out, you know, on behalf of the patient, make it easier to go, be seen, you know, to understand who's the right doctor for them, to understand, you know, that they can reach this doctor at any time, you know, over the phone, through other modalities. These are all things that we are now supporting. And again, for us, it's been also a bit of a mind shift away from, hey, everything has to happen on zocdoc.com.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  We now have products, for example, that can live on the provider's own homepage. We have products that can live in their call center. We have products that are internal to them to help them take friction out for the patient. And so this is a journey that we'll continue to be on. And it's really driven by the use cases and where we have unique capabilities and expertise so that we can add value to the journey of the patient and by extension of the doctor.

• 21:28Julie Yoo?

  Yeah, to that end, you have also recently announced some partnerships on the insurance side. And in some ways, that's, you know, the tail that wags the dog on all of this is I could, you know, have the best appointments booked in the most timely fashion, but if I'm not going to get reimbursed for it, then it's all moot. And so can you speak a little bit to that of, you know, what is, what role does, do the payer partnerships play in, you know, making the experience better for the patients and providers? And what gets unlocked as you guys extend that strategy?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so one of our classical implementations here.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Is with, for example, Blue Shield of California, where on their own member directory, you can now book directly a doctor's appointment, and that's powered by Zocdoc ultimately. And it is such a natural point of integration where they can now serve their patients better. They can be there when a patient makes the decision to get care with all the insights that they can generate from that. And they can keep patients out of high cost modalities like the emergency room that are 10 to 12 times as expensive as ambulatory care and have worse outcomes. And so it's really a win-win-win.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  What was interesting for us on this journey is actually that the amount of change on the payer side is relatively minimal, right? They can now plug into our healthcare access infrastructure and it just works out of the box. So once they realize that that's happening, you start with one area in a payer and then suddenly other people come and say, can I use this also? And like I have this use case and this other use case. And pretty quickly, you're working with the entire organization, which is very, very exciting to us. And honestly, not something that I would have expected going into that. But now I'm very positively, in a very positive state of mind here to find that.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  And so we think that we will be in a position to serve a large number of members in the coming year.

• 23:39Julie Yoo?

  What in a situation like that, so you have like the trifecta of payers, providers and consumers now like directly engaged with you in a formal relationship fashion. What is your business model in that context? Like, and has that changed as you've moved towards away from just providers and now getting involved with payers? You know, how do you think about monetization incentives? And I know you've done a lot of work even legally to try to push the envelope on how people think about things like Stark and anti-kickback. Maybe you can share some of those war stories and a little bit of the journey of how you got to your current business model.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And we started out as a subscription business where we charged every doctor the same amount of money just to be on the platform. That quite frankly, didn't work as well as we hoped because some doctors saw a lot of patients, some doctors saw a lot fewer, and everyone paid the same amount of money. And ultimately, it was maybe too expensive for some and too cheap for others. We were very blessed by getting, presenting this issue to the regulator and also laying out why a system like Zocdoc is really beneficial for the patient, for the provider, for the payers. And we ultimately got permission to operate the model that we operate today,

• 25:02Speaker 02

  which is we charge a provider for a discovery booking, meaning a booking where the patient was doing a general search and we connected them to that doctor. Notably, we don't charge for bookings where a patient is looking for a specific doctor to begin with, and all we do is facilitate the booking. That's that software that should be free and we make it free. And as such, we have a very, very low bar for the patient, for the financial bar for the doctor to come and join Zocdoc. There are many ways how you can use us for free. And it just takes sort of the initial friction out of this entire relationship building.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  So that's sort of how we are building our provider network today. And it works fantastically. One stat that I'm particularly proud of is that 97% of the providers we signed up in the last 12 months inbounded to us. That's word of mouth. Their friends tell them this is a system that really works. You should join too. And then they come to us and we onboard them. And that's been sort of a number that has been going up over the last few years. And we're very glad to see that. That just tells us we're doing something right for the doctors. On the payer side, we are monetizing slightly differently and it depends on the specific relationship. They get access to the entire network of providers.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  They can schedule their patients with us. They can, to the extent that they are, for example, in the AI platform, they can immediately check also the insurance participation of the patient, of the provider, make sure this is really a match before they send the patient on their way. And it's all turnkey out of one relationship. We always focus on it being a win-win-win to make sure that this is really seamless and that we minimize any financial friction for our partners.

• 27:05Julie Yoo?

  You mentioned a few metrics, Oliver. I'm curious, back in the day at Chyris, we used to measure things like wait times, distribution of capacity utilization across a group of providers and making sure that every provider is getting utilized in sort of relatively equal ways, things of that sort. Like, can you share what kind of impact you've had? Like, are you seeing reductions in wait times? And I think it was like 45 days was the average wait time for a primary care doctor's appointment in Boston at the time that I left Chyris. Has that gotten better? And what have been the drivers of impact in either direction? Like, has it gotten worse actually in certain areas? And why do you think that's the case?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  So the sad story is broadly, since we started, it's gotten worse. When we got started, there was roughly 17 days, the average wait time nationwide to see a primary care doctor. Now it's 31 days. However, using Zocdoc, you can see a doctor typically within three days or less, right? So 72 hours. And that's true for a broad range of specialties. And it's true because doctors have last minute cancellations. They have no shows, they have reschedules. This last minute capacity that we're surfacing to the patient and recapture. And this is one of the most incredible things about the entire healthcare system. If we compare that with airplanes, right?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Like airplanes used to fly 60% full, but that was in the 70s. With the advent of the internet, we had the kayaks and the expedias and the bookings.com. And now airplanes have a load factor of over 90%. In the wild, doctors have load factors around 70%, just under 70%. Now with Zocdoc, we fill that last minute capacity. And this is how we can get to the three day average time. And quite frankly, we manage it to, we manage our network to be, for a patient to be able to have that experience. So when we see that there's low capacity in one of our specialty zip code insurance quadrants,

• 29:15Speaker 02

  then we will add providers there. And we're really much more driven by the patient experience and patient metrics than we are by any other metric. And that's because we believe that when the patient wins, everyone wins.

• 29:32Julie Yoo?

  That's incredible. What's, and you know, one of the, like a cynical view about what you just described is that if you're able to book an appointment within three days, on whether it's Zocdoc or any other mechanism, like something's wrong with that doctor. Like, why do they have availability when all the best doctors are booked out for months? What's your, what's your take on that? Like, and your philosophy around like quality? And how consumers should think about like judging the caliber of whatever capacity is available in the system? And do you have examples where you've actually, like where you have teeth behind SLAs, for instance, or if providers do not demonstrate certain outcomes on your platform, you would pull them off? You know, any teeth behind that concept?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  So, yes, on both sides. So one kind of counterintuitive bit is that actually the best doctors tend to have the worst utilization because they frequently treat patients that have very busy lives and cancel them more often and they don't double book. And we actually, there's a funny anecdote where one of the deans of one of the academic medical centers we work with here in New York said, hey, I'm booked out three months in the future. I don't think I should be on Zocdoc. And we said, okay, fine, we'll take you off, but give us just another 30 days and just let's see how many patients actually end up booking with you. And it was something in the order of magnitude of 40 patients.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Because sure enough, he had last minute cancellations that would have gone to waste. But we were able to connect a patient with them who were obviously keen to see him last minute, but found him through Zocdoc. And so he got better utilization and these patients got to see him. And to my knowledge, he's still on the system today because that's obviously the kinds of service that good doctors want to deliver to their patients. In terms of who gets to be on Zocdoc, we are more selective than your neighborhood state board. We have our own qualification entities and rules.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  And we do make sure that the doctors that are on Zocdoc all pass that. And we do remove doctors that don't.

• 31:53Julie Yoo?

  Thinking ahead, like what's next for us? You guys have accomplished so much and expanded the footprint of your product, expanded the number of markets that you sell into, evolve your business model, lean into AI. You know, there's so much surface area now to what you do. What is maybe one or two big things that you look forward to that is on the roadmap for your company? And what keeps you up at night? Like, what are you fearful about in terms of the future for the business?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Well, my superpower is sleeping. I don't know. So I don't really stay up at night that long. But I'll say that our goal is to connect every single provider and make sure that every single front door in healthcare opens, right? This is why we've opened up our healthcare access infrastructure so that every payer, every AI platform, every consumer platform, review platform, search site, they can connect their patients directly to a doctor and it will work and it will work well. And I think that's a contribution to US welfare and healthcare that we would be very proud of.

• 32:59Julie Yoo?

  Amazing. Anything that we didn't cover, Oliver, that you want to speak to?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think that's really the aspiration. We are hiring. I strongly believe that people are going to be necessary and much more productive through AI. But we want the strongest possible team. So if you're excited by making it easier for patients to connect to care wherever they are or like seek us out, very much looking forward to meeting you.

• 33:27Julie Yoo?

  Amazing. And I presume that if you're a startup building in this space and you want access to the Zocdoc APIs, is that something that's really available on your website?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  It's right. Just find it on the website, submit your information, we'll get back to you.

• 33:39Julie Yoo?

  Thank you so much, Oliver. Congratulations on everything you've done over the long arc of time that you and I have been in this space. And we look forward to what's coming in the future for Zocdoc.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Good to be here. Thank you so much.

• 33:52Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

• 34:36Erik Torenberg?

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.