The End of the No-Call No-Show?

Connor Kunz Connor Kunz

15 minutes in the planned shift. No clock-in notification, and maybe an angry call from a client or their family wondering where the caregiver is.

It’s the bane of every home care owner’s existence.

(I’ve heard some owners award that title to applicants not showing up to interviews, but there’s a difference—with a no-call no-show, there’s a ready client and billable hours on the line.)

The 'nuclear event in home care'

One of our advisors who runs an agency even goes so far as to call the no-call no-show "the nuclear event in home care." The event with the potential to blow up a client relationship in one fell swoop.

When our team started digging into the ways that new developments in artificial intelligence will change home care, we realized that—for the first time—we had a solution to this problem at our fingertips.

Solved.

I’m not an engineer, so I’m grossly oversimplifying the science behind this.

But effectively, here’s how it works:

Our team figured out a proprietary set of heuristics that, when looked at in tandem, are highly likely to identify which shifts are at-risk of the caregiver not showing up.

Some of these really surprised me—they don’t all have to do with the shift at all, or even caregiver characteristics you'd expect.

But combined, they can predict a no-call no-show with what I would call (pardon my French) a freaky-high level of accuracy.

Our engineers used a pretty creative way to embed an LLM (Large Language Model) AI system into the software in a way that it actually understands the business, has context on how it operates.

It’s not just ChatGPT dropped into a home care system—it’s ChatGPT if it were professionally trained to understand the business and function as an employee, right down to being told what tone to use when communicating with employees.

  • Once a shift is recognized at-risk of becoming a no-show (whether from a call-in, no check-in, or our system flagging it as at-risk), the AI in our system (think of it as a virtual care coordinator) immediately scans schedules/client compatibility and reaches out to caregivers to see who can take it.
  • Instead of a humans dropping whatever they’re doing and handling the challenge manually, the AI can do it all at once while the human employees focus on whatever they’re already doing.
  • Once the AI finds caregivers willing to take the shift, it sends the list of potential replacements to a pre-designated human admin to approve.
  • Crisis averted.
  • All of this could happen in a matter of minutes or less.

The bottom line is that instead of the care coordinator learning 15 minutes into the shift that nobody is showing up, they get something like the message below a comfortable amount of time before the shift:

All this still undersells the elegance of seeing it in action.

Slack screenshot reaction from the first partner we showed:

We can't overstate the implications of this

In no way does this concept of a virtual care coordinator that prevents no-call no-shows eliminate human jobs.

Rather, it frees employees from one of the most stressful possible situations in home care so they can keep focused on proactive tasks to grow the business.

At the agency level, this frees up time (and probably brings everybody's blood pressure down a little).

At the corporate level, this not only introduces a direct and immediate boost to client satisfaction, but also frees up a combined thousands of hours of paid manpower each year that can be redirected into tasks that aren't putting out fires.

Limited availability for now, see below

Our first cohort of customers using these features launches in July.

Because of the team/cost logistics of implementing technology like this in our platform, we're starting with a select group of franchisor partners and large independents (at least $2-5M in revenue).

No-call no-shows are about to become a thing of the past.