If you’re trying to see a doctor, you’ll soon be able to book an appointment in more places. Online scheduler Zocdoc is expanding its Care Access Network, allowing the infrastructure that powers its own site to be used by other platforms where people search for and book medical care.
Among the sites rolling out the scheduling feature—which lets people see and book open appointments with local clinicians that can be sorted by which insurance they accept—are Yelp and Healthgrades, as well as Amazon Health AI, which will use the technology for nationwide appointment booking. It’ll also be used by Blue Shield of California, which began piloting the network last year, and the Veterans Health Administration in partnership with Wellhive—a partnership that dates back to 2023. Since July, Google Gemini users have been able to book appointments inside the tool via Zocdoc.
It’s a move executives see as helping alleviate a common point of friction in finding healthcare, as the average time to get an appointment with a physician hovers around 31 days.
“In travel, you book; in retail, you buy; in healthcare, you’re blocked,” says Oliver Kharraz, CEO and founder of Zocdoc. “Healthcare is the last major consumer industry where there isn’t a universal access layer.”
In its efforts to build that layer, Zocdoc has spent years expanding its reach with doctors, requiring the company to build out its capabilities for connecting its tools to doctors’ scheduling software. For Kharraz, who cofounded the company in 2007, the rollout marks a new phase of growth.
“We’re seeing many of the opportunities of scale for the first time,” Kharraz says. “We see the opportunity and we want to act on it.”
Building the infrastructure
Right now, Zocdoc’s provider network includes 200,000 providers across the country—a number Kharraz describes as a “critical mass” that the company has largely built in the past five years. Since 2023, its provider network has had a compound annual growth rate of 50%, helping it reach a total of 20 million patients with 10,000 different insurance plans.
As with many aspects of healthcare, the numbers belie a deep level of complexity that comes with navigating thousands of different doctors’ scheduling systems, health insurance networks, and care specialties.
“Healthcare has a resistance to disruption,” Kharraz says. “It’s the brownfield industry where $5 trillion has already been poured into infrastructure that you cannot easily innovate around. So as you try to improve the healthcare experience for consumers . . . you have to slowly and painstakingly connect all these separate stakeholders to modernize an obsolete system.”
The Care Access Network was partially built through Zocdoc’s work with the Veterans Health Administration, with which it has partnered for several years. It also began piloting the Care Access Network with a private insurer for the first time last year, working with Blue Shield of California to revamp its provider directory, which didn’t previously allow direct booking.
“If you are looking for a doctor and you go to a website and all you get is a long list of providers, pages after pages . . . you can’t complete the loop and you can’t actually make an appointment,” Shah says. “We say this is the last mile and it’s incomplete last mile.”
The pilot brought Zocdoc’s tools to the insurer’s provider directory, enabling direct booking for a growing number of doctors in its network. The insurer says its directory now offers more than two million hours of appointments over a 90-day window—a number that has doubled over the course of the pilot. It’s also seen booked appointments increase sevenfold, with an average wait time of six days and a no-show rate of 2%.
“More and more members are actually starting to use this feature and become repeat users, which usually tells me this is actually a good product because they use it once, six months later they come back and use it again,” Shah says.
Poised for growth
The investment in physician recruitment and technology that Zocdoc has made has come with overall business growth. In May, Kharraz announced that Zocdoc had been profitable on an annual basis since 2023. At the time, longtime investor Khosla Ventures offered to purchase some of the company’s stock at $21 per share, an offer that valued the company at $2.3 billion.
Khosla has had a longstanding relationship with Zocdoc, leading the company’s $3 million Series A round in 2008. It also took part in Zocdoc’s $15 million Series B raise in July 2010. A Khosla managing director familiar with the investment characterized Khosla’s investment—and venture capital more broadly—as “patient capital,” noting that Khosla has long understood that Zocdoc would ideally grow to a critical mass of users and doctors, building a valuable network.
And while the company has moved into profitability leaning on its marketplace offering—on which it gets paid when a user books a first-time appointment with a provider—the Care Access Network expansion positions the infrastructure as a revenue stream ready for growth. The company has distinct financial arrangements with each partner.
That means Zocdoc’s C-suite is also ready for growth. Among Kharraz’s new hires in 2026 is Brian Irving, Zocdoc’s first CMO. Kharraz says the move is meant to strengthen the company’s recognition among a broader set of consumers.
“When we poll people why they don’t use Zocdoc, the number one reason by a large margin is that they didn’t know it existed,” Kharraz says. “We want to change that because it’s something that people that have used it wouldn’t want to miss in their lives.”