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

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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 Yoo 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 the 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 the right doctor becomes as easy as booking a flight.

Julie Yoo (0:51)

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 health care 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?

Oliver Kharraz (1:33)

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.

Julie Yoo (2:15)

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

Oliver Kharraz (3:06)

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 have data that's more than 99 percent accurate, which compares quite favorably with your average insurance directory.

The reason in the Gordon Nottier was actually enabling the transaction. When you put out a provider directory, frequently you're in the business of publishing the Encyclopedia Britannica. 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 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.