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

In travel, you book a flight. In ecommerce, you buy a product. But in healthcare, simply booking an appointment can still take weeks. In this episode, a sixteen z general partner Julie Yu sits down with ZocDoc founder and CEO Oliver Caraz 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 in other platforms. They also discussed Sockdoc's partnership with Gemini, why no single company should own the front door to health care, 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? I am so excited to be here with Oliver Caraz, 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 DocDoc has continued to evolve. And, arguably, DocDoc 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? 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. 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 …