Zocdoc, the marketplace for booking provider visits, is making its infrastructure available to enterprise partners to support bookings anywhere patients look for care.
The new enterprise offering, Care Access Network, invites payers and tech or consumer platforms to deliver seamless booking directly on their websites. The infrastructure is built on two decades of connecting provider orgs, payers, electronic health records (EHRs) and practice management systems with scheduling workflows. Zocdoc’s marketplace today connects to over 200,000 providers across over 200 specialties and 10,000 plans.
“I’m incredibly proud of the door we built with Zocdoc.com, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the front door to healthcare can’t be owned,” Oliver Kharraz, M.D., founder and CEO of Zocdoc, told Fierce Healthcare in an advanced interview. Wherever a consumer is searching, “you should be able to book right there and then.”
Over two-thirds of patients regularly search multiple places when looking for care, including insurance directories, provider sites, hospital directories, search engines and AI platforms, a recent Zocdoc survey found. Yet they often encounter dated information, disconnected scheduling systems and dead ends. With the national average time to see a specialist at 31 days, streamlining scheduling as much as possible is crucial, per Kharraz. The company claims the typical patient using its platform can be seen within 24 to 72 hours of booking, much faster than the national average.
As part of the announcement, Zocdoc unveiled a partnership with Amazon Health AI. Other partners include Google’s Gemini, Yelp, Healthgrades, Blue Shield of California, WellHive and other search engines. In some cases, like with Veterans Affairs (VA), Zocdoc is powering the scheduling tool for caseworkers instead of patients. Partners can connect through machine-readable data feeds, Zocdoc’s developer API or its MCP server for AI-powered experiences. A project can be stood up within hours and fully implemented in a few weeks, per Kharraz.
“Health is complex—it’s highly regulated and we want to make sure that we are working with the ecosystem to give someone a true end to end experience,” Amy McDonough, managing director of Google for Health, told Fierce Healthcare. Since introducing AI capabilities, Google has seen consumers start to ask longer and more nuanced questions on its search engine. People are becoming comfortable with a more conversational tone. And Gemini is already used as an everyday personal assistant. Now, people can book appointments in a conversational way on Gemini.
It works like this: a user tells Gemini they want to book an appointment for a specific issue. The chatbot automatically brings up a Zocdoc widget, which must be enabled to surface available time slots. Once a user clicks on one, it takes them to Zocdoc’s interface to complete the booking. Gemini can automatically pull nearby available appointments based on a user’s location, if it’s enabled. Gemini’s algorithm also determines what kind of appointment or subspecialty a user needs based on their chat.
Redirecting users to Zocdoc to complete the booking is intentional. “We’re not trying to be the one that are delivering care,” Arlene Chung, M.D., genAI consumer health product lead at Google, told Fierce Healthcare. “We are connecting folks to the right care…and then pass them with the relevant information.” In the coming weeks, the Zocdoc integration is also coming to the 24/7 agent Gemini Spark. “We’re trying to make this all available easily and also for free to any user that would want it, where they already are coming,” Chung said.
Already, some Care Access Network partners are seeing results: Blue Shield of California, which began working with Zocdoc on this in 2025, has unlocked 2 million hours of bookable appointments available in a 90-day period, a 2x increase since launch. The plan has seen a 7x increase in booked appointments, with an average wait time of six days.
“Zocdoc was the obvious choice to collaborate on this work, thanks to the scale of their provider network and the ease of integration,” Jigar Shah, chief marketing and strategy officer at Blue Shield of California, said in the announcement.
As part of its expansion, Zocdoc recently brought on a chief technology officer, the company’s first-ever chief marketing officer and a first VP of government affairs, among others. The latter’s responsibility will include lobbying for expansion of this type of technology, Kharraz said. For years, Zocdoc has worked with the VA and has had a strong relationship with government agencies.
“We’re investing in maintaining that in the future, but Zocdoc wants to be part of the solution and a lot of these problems are being discussed in D.C.,” he said.
Kharraz believes it behooves any AI-driven company to integrate with Care Access Network. “Information alone doesn’t cut it anymore for the consumer,” Kharraz said. “The next step is always that you need to get to actual care.”
“Now, anyone who has patients frequenting them can use our Care Access Network to power scheduling, access to care on their own properties,” Kharraz concluded.