AI Scheduling for Home Health: Driving Growth Through Improved Accuracy

A scaling home health agency was facing rising patient demand and expanding to more complex types of care. Its scheduling and operations team was forced to schedule 60-day episodes by hand while following strict Medicare rules about supervisory visits, OASIS recertifications, and more.

GGB Healthcare partnered with the agency to build a tailored AI solution that integrated with its existing systems and automatically scheduled 60-day episodes in their EHR.

This AI scheduling agent dramatically boosted productivity and allowed the scheduling team to focus on growth-oriented activities, handling 15% more visits per week.

Problem

• Before GGB, each 60-day episode was built by hand and manually entered, visit-by-visit, into the agency's systems
• Scheduling team needed to check several inputs (clinician availability, supervisory visit rules, and recertification timelines) across multiple screens and programs
• As the census grew, scheduling became the main bottleneck for managing new & existing patient visits
• Standard changes in provider availability resulted in time-consuming manual edits
• Agency's scheduling rules couldn't be automatically enforced in their EHR, requiring scheduling and operations leaders to conduct manual accuracy checks to prevent claim denials

GGB's Approach

• Partnered with scheduling and operations team to analyze workflows and identify key bottlenecks
• Documented scheduling rules and best practices from across the team, which were then encoded into AI scheduling logic to generate accurate & compliant episodes
• Integrated with the agency's existing EHR via formal partnership & coordination with key stakeholders
• Launched solution to automatically generate compliant schedules and enter them into the EHR on behalf of the scheduling team

Solution

• AI scheduling agent analyzes past scheduling data, incorporates changes such as newly hired providers or updated scheduling rules, and automatically generates schedule drafts for confirmation
• Scheduling solution handles all disciplines within an episode, ranging from skilled nursing to home health aide visits
• Proposed schedules automatically flag visit patterns like frequency change orders and provider substitutions to the scheduling team for confirmation
• Scheduling team reviews, adjusts, and approves each episode using a purpose-built interface for each scheduler's needs & preferences
• AI solution automatically enters each approved episode into the EHR, ensuring accurate and rapid data entry that lets schedulers focus on higher value activities

Outcome

• 95% reduction in scheduling time: AI solution streamlines manual scheduling tasks so the team spends its time where it matters most
• More scheduling capacity: Scheduling and operations team handles 15% more visits per week, allowing the agency to "do more with less" as it continues to scale
• Prioritize agency growth: Scheduling and operations team shifted their time to highest value, growth-focused activities while delegating manual work to an AI teammate that only escalates the most complex scenarios
• Humans in control: Scheduling and operations team has full authority over final scheduling decisions and can quickly make adjustments using a customized user interface
• Improved accuracy: Every 60-day episode is reviewed by the AI agent multiple times to ensure it complies with agency & clinical guidelines, preventing payment denials for unauthorized visits
• Smarter over time: AI solution incorporates new scheduling rules on an ongoing basis, maximizing accuracy and serving as a single source of truth for scheduling guidelines, so no one person is a point of failure

What the team says

Ready to spend less time building schedules and more time growing your agency? Contact us to learn how GGB Healthcare can help your agency.