Blue Shield of California has teamed up with Zocdoc for members to more easily schedule in-person appointments with providers in their health plan network, the companies announced on Wednesday.
Zocdoc connects consumers with primary care providers and specialists and to see their schedules and book appointments digitally. Blue Shield of California is bringing that seamless digital experience to its members to facilitate access to covered providers.
The new feature is available through Blue Shield of California’s searchable provider directory on its website. With the last-mile infrastructure provided by Zocdoc, members can immediately see the participating providers’ availability and book an appointment.
The partnership is expected to make available a million hours of provider availability per month for Blue Shield of California members. Being able to offer this scale of provider availability was important to the payer and Zocdoc before they rolled out the feature, executives said.
“This is not one of these small programs that hardly anyone can use,” Oliver Kharraz, M.D., founder and CEO of Zocdoc, said. “It really addresses all of Blue Shield California's members, with over a million instantly bookable hours of care available across primary care, but also over 150 different specialties, mental health, vision, dental and more.”
Providers that contract with Blue Shield of California can opt into the scheduling program for free and without joining Zocdoc.com. The companies want to incentivize provider participation in the program and expand the ways providers work with the health plan.
Consumers have also come to expect a fully digital experience of booking with providers. While Blue Shield of CA already had the capability to book telehealth appointments online, it did not have the same ease of scheduling for in-person appointments.
Previously, members could use the provider directory to identify possible providers, but the search results offered little more than a phonebook to members. Some members may have delayed care because of the hassle of calling a list of providers to check for availability, Jigar Shah, chief marketing and strategy officer at Blue Shield of California, said in an interview.
In the past three weeks since the feature was rolled out, providers and members have expressed satisfaction with the new capabilities.
“We have a higher satisfaction with our members,” Shah said. “They came looking for an appointment. They actually get an appointment in that moment. Patients and members are obviously very happy that they actually close the loop in there, and the provider secures that appointment without having that additional call to the front office who could be assisting other patients with more value-added questions.”
Instead of connecting one-by-one with providers in Blue Shield of California’s network, the non-profit payer opted to partner with Zocdoc, which has been building out the last-mile infrastructure for scheduling appointments with providers for the last 18 years. The Zocdoc infrastructure is available for partnering organizations through an API.
“We've spent the last 18 years essentially plugging in the last mile into these doctors’ EHRs,” Kharraz explained. “There's hundreds of these EHRs in use. We've learned how to create these integrations out of the box, and they're very good at connecting additional ones. And we have connected roughly 200,000 providers nationwide.”
Kharraz said on Zocdoc.com, just under 20% of patients book appointments with primary care providers, including pediatricians and OBGYNs, and 80% book across the range of the 250 specialties represented on the platform.
“We decided what the healthcare system really needs is an open system, connective tissue between all these systems, and we have dedicated ourselves to providing this and [making] it accessible to patients where they are,” Kharraz said.