Home health scheduling
Home health scheduling software, for the person actually driving.
Most scheduling systems were built for a scheduler at a desk. The day falls apart in a car park. Here is what home health scheduling has to solve, where the usual tools fail, and what we built instead.
Most home health scheduling software was built for the office, not for the car. It assumes a scheduler sitting at a desk with a mouse, moving visits around a grid while the clinician waits to be told. That works until 9am on a Monday, when a patient cancels, a referral arrives, and the person who has to react is forty minutes away with a phone in a cupholder.
This page is a plain description of what scheduling software for home health has to do, what most of it gets wrong, and what we are building instead.
What home health scheduling actually has to solve
A home health schedule is not a calendar. A calendar holds appointments that somebody else has already decided. A home health schedule has to be computed, because five things push against each other at once:
- Visit frequency from the plan of care. Two visits a week for six weeks is not the same as any two days; the gap between them matters clinically.
- Time windows. A patient who needs insulin before breakfast is not a patient you can see at four.
- Drive time between addresses. The single largest hidden cost, and the one a grid on a screen hides completely.
- Clinician discipline and skill mix. An RN visit is not interchangeable with an LPN or a therapy visit.
- The day falling apart. Cancellations, no-answers, a hospital admission, a road closed. Every one of these invalidates the plan that was correct an hour ago.
Software that only stores the answer to those constraints is a filing cabinet. Software that solves them is a scheduler.
Where most home health scheduling software falls down
| What it does | Why it hurts in the field |
|---|---|
| Drag-and-drop calendar grid | Nothing in the grid knows the distance between two addresses, so a "tidy" day can add an hour of driving nobody sees. |
| Office-only scheduling | The person who learns a visit is cancelled is the clinician at the door, and they cannot fix the day from there. |
| Typing on a phone | Anything that needs two hands and a keyboard gets done in the car park, or at 9pm, or not at all. |
| Mileage recorded after the fact | By then the miles are spent. The useful moment is before the driving, not on the expense form. |
| Rescheduling as a manual puzzle | One cancellation should be a question the software answers, not an afternoon a scheduler loses. |
What we built instead
You speak; the day re-plans
"Arthur cancelled." "Move Beatriz to ten." "Who can take nine o'clock?" The schedule re-orders, the drive times recompute, and the visits that no longer fit are named with the reason they did not fit. Nothing is committed until you say yes.
A new patient from a photo of the referral
Photograph the referral and the fields fill in, each with a confidence score and each traceable to where it appeared on the page. A value that is not on the page is dropped rather than guessed. You confirm before anything is saved.
A suggested time is not an agreed time
Every visit is marked as one or the other, because telling a patient a time nobody agreed to is the failure that costs an agency its reputation. Moving a visit clears its agreement, deliberately.
The gap gets filled by who is nearest
When a visit falls through, the question is not "who is free" but "who is free and close". The answer is ranked by the driving it would actually add.
Choosing home health scheduling software: what to ask
- Does it know drive time, or only clock time? Ask to see two versions of the same day and the mileage for each.
- Can a clinician change the day from the field, hands-free? Watch somebody do it in a car park, not in a demo room.
- What happens to a visit that will not fit? Silence is the wrong answer. It should be named, with a reason you can act on.
- Does it distinguish proposed times from agreed times? If not, somebody will quote a patient a time nobody confirmed.
- Where does the audio and the referral image go? If the answer is a vendor cloud, that is a decision you are making about patient data.
- How long to add a patient? Time it with a stopwatch on a real referral, not a clean sample.
Who this is for
Home health nurses and aides, physical, occupational and speech therapists, hospice teams, mobile phlebotomists, social workers and case managers, and the schedulers who plan for them. Anyone whose working day is a list of addresses and the driving in between.
Questions people actually ask
What is home health scheduling software?
Software that decides which clinician visits which patient, when, and in what order. Unlike a calendar it has to respect visit frequency from the plan of care, time windows, clinician discipline, and the drive time between addresses, then re-solve all of it when the day changes.
How is scheduling different from routing in home health?
Scheduling decides who sees whom and on which day. Routing decides the order of the visits within a day and the driving between them. They are usually sold separately and that is the problem: a schedule that ignores distance produces a route nobody can drive.
Can a nurse change the schedule from the field?
In most systems, no; they call the office. Obillions is built so the clinician says what changed out loud and the day re-plans in front of them, with nothing committed until they confirm.
Does scheduling software reduce mileage?
It can, when it optimises the visit order rather than just storing it. How much depends on your territory and caseload density. We built a free calculator that estimates it for your own numbers rather than quoting an average.
Is Obillions available now?
It is in private testing. A public TestFlight is next, then the App Store. Follow the launch on X or write to hello@obillions.com.
Does it work for hospice and therapy, not just nursing?
Yes. Nothing in the scheduling model is nursing-specific: it works for any discipline whose day is a set of visits at addresses with time windows.
Obillions
A voice agent for a day of visits. You say what changed and the day re-plans itself: the order, the drive times, and who nearby could take the hour a cancellation just freed. Nothing changes until you confirm, and your voice and photos never leave your phone.
In private testing now. A public TestFlight comes next, then the App Store.