Octave Gets Hundreds of Therapists to Production Without Getting Stuck in the Implementation Gap

About Octave

Octave is a modern behavioral health practice on a mission to make high-quality mental health care both accessible and sustainable. Founded in 2018 by Sandeep Acharya, the San Francisco-based company offers in-person and virtual therapy (individual, couples, and family) across multiple states. Backed by $86M+ in funding from Cigna Ventures, Novo Holdings, Greycroft, and Felicis Ventures, Octave partners directly with major payers including Anthem, Aetna, and UnitedHealthcare to make therapy affordable through insurance. The company was recently named a USA TODAY Top Workplace, and 95% of clients say therapy through Octave has been worth the effort.

The challenge

Octave’s care model depends on seamless scheduling. Every therapist needs real-time calendar visibility. Every client needs to book, reschedule, or confirm sessions without friction. And every payer integration requires accurate availability data.

Building that calendar infrastructure in-house would have meant maintaining direct integrations with Google, Microsoft, and other providers, each with its own OAuth flow, API quirks, and rate limits. But the harder problem wasn’t the build. It was everything that comes after: navigating Google’s OAuth scope verification process, configuring multi-environment authentication, designing a webhook architecture that holds up under real scheduling load, and coordinating the handoffs between engineering and product before anything could ship.

For a company already navigating HIPAA, payer contracts, and a rapidly growing therapist network, those were weeks of engineering cycles that had nothing to do with the product. Every hour spent in the implementation gap was an hour not spent on clinical tools, outcome tracking, or the WiseMatch directory platform Octave was building toward.

Why Nylas

Octave already had a scheduling platform, provider workflows, and integrations with leading EHR and EMR systems. Their next challenge was a Google Calendar API integration that would incorporate providers’ real-time Google Calendar data into the scheduling experience.

To make that possible, providers needed a secure way to connect their Google accounts so Octave could accurately reflect real-world availability. This would allow the platform to surface additional appointment inventory while reducing the risk of double bookings caused by scheduling conflicts outside the core healthcare systems.

The challenge wasn’t simply integrating with Google Calendar. It was navigating Google’s OAuth verification requirements and implementing a production-ready authentication and synchronization workflow.

To accelerate the process, Octave purchased a Nylas QuickLaunch onboarding package. The Nylas Professional Services team worked alongside their engineers to prepare for Google’s OAuth verification process, configure authentication flows, and establish the calendar synchronization architecture needed for launch.

With Nylas assisting in navigating the complexity surrounding Google Calendar connectivity and OAuth verification, Octave was able to focus on expanding provider availability within its existing scheduling platform rather than investing engineering resources in building and validating these workflows from scratch.

The results

Within weeks, Octave successfully launched Google Calendar connectivity for providers, enabling therapists to securely connect their calendars and share real-time availability.

By combining Google Calendar availability with existing scheduling data, Octave was able to surface additional appointment inventory while maintaining confidence that displayed availability reflected providers’ actual schedules. This helped reduce the risk of double bookings and improved the accuracy of appointment booking across the platform.

Today, more than 200 therapist calendars (and counting) are connected through Google, with calendar updates continuously synchronized to keep availability current. The integration has become a key component of Octave’s strategy to expand access to care by making more bookable appointment slots available to patients.

Most importantly, the onboarding engagement accelerated the path through Google’s OAuth verification process and reduced implementation risk, allowing the team to focus engineering resources on product development and platform growth.

What’s next

Octave is scaling toward all 50 states and deepening its payer partnerships. As the therapist network grows, so does the demand on its scheduling infrastructure. Nylas provides the calendar backbone, plus the implementation support, that scales with them, no matter how many providers, grants, or payer integrations come online.