Zocdoc, a platform for scheduling and booking doctors’ appointments, has launched a voice AI agent called Zo to book appointments by phone.
The phone assistant is aimed at removing wait time bottlenecks for patients and providers, engaging like a human with conversational language to make appointments. Zo can handle an unlimited number of inbound scheduling calls and can schedule appointments 24/7. The goal is to free up busy call centers or practice staff to help with questions that need human interaction.
“The most complicated thing for practices is to deal with the inbound calls, because they happen in spikes and you don’t know why the person is actually calling you,” Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare.
The tool has been deployed with existing marketplace customers since Q3 of 2024 and is now offered more broadly. Zo replaces practices’ slower interactive voice response or patient routing systems, handling calls on the first ring. It is “vastly configurable,” per Kharraz, and integrates with existing phone systems and EHRs.
Organizations don’t have to be Zocdoc Marketplace customers to use Zo. There are no upfront fees, implementation costs or long-term commitments. Customers can try it for $2 per successfully booked appointment. Enterprise clients that want to deploy Zo at scale will have access to discounted pricing.
Though the tool has been in the works for two years, it is built on the company’s nearly two decades of scheduling experience. Phone line bottlenecks were the reason the company was founded: “That’s why we started Zocdoc to begin with,” Kharraz said.
An MGMA survey found providers say many patients schedule appointments with the front desk or with a call center. But many of these calls go unanswered, per Kharraz, which is a missed business opportunity. More than half of Americans are likely to switch docs if they can’t get through to their office, Zocdoc found in a recent survey of more than 1,000 adults. More than half of those who can’t get through delay care as a result, while a third give up on scheduling a visit entirely.
“It’s not that the doctors didn’t want to create a great experience for a patient over the phone. It’s that it’s very difficult to do that,” Kharraz said. Voice AI agents are a powerful tool. The challenge is getting the domain expertise right: scheduling the right time, noting the right visit reason, matching the patient to the right provider and verifying their insurance correctly.
Zocdoc is seeing a lot of rapid adoption among existing customers, and early adopters of Zo report positive experiences: Zo resolves up to 70% of scheduling calls without staff intervention. The average call is successfully resolved in less than three minutes and 30 seconds.
The remaining third of calls that Zo can’t yet resolve get escalated to a human. In most cases, Zo can’t resolve them because providers have requested certain cases be booked by a human, like if a clinical evaluation is first needed. Occasionally, it’s because a patient asks for availability that does not exist and is not satisfied with the offered alternatives. Kharraz believes that, over time, Zo will be able to handle every call because a computer can deal with infinite amounts of complexity compared to a human.
Looking to the future, Zocdoc is working to build out additional capabilities like outbound calls to remind patients of checkups, fill last-minute cancellations and notify waitlisted patients about new openings. “In a resource-unlimited world, why doesn't every doctor visit deserve a follow-up call?” Kharraz said. “I think it’s going to be another step into transforming how healthcare is delivered in the country.”
Zocdoc is building out capabilities to coordinate prescription refills, the second most common reason for patients to call a practice, per Kharraz. It also hopes to introduce additional languages to support patients and to engage with patients via text and chat channels as well.
The expansion represents a major step forward in Zocdoc’s ambition to power scheduling everywhere patients are seeking care. Zocdoc is already powering scheduling on providers’ websites, Google Business Profiles and insurance directories.