Case Study - VitalCaring streamlines scheduling at scale with HCHB Smart Scheduling

Customer snapshot 

VitalCaring delivers compassionate, high-quality home-based healthcare to patients in the comfort of their own homes. From its base in Texas, VitalCaring has expanded to become a national leader in home health and hospice, serving patients and communities in 11 states. The agency delivers an exceptional patient experience at every encounter by bringing together like-minded people who are called to care and supported by a positive organizational culture.   

Challenge 

As VitalCaring expanded nationally, scheduling performance remained strong but sustaining that performance required increasing back-office resources as the organization grew. Operating across multiple states required consistent, scalable scheduling practices to support continued growth. Each branch relied on local schedulers, limiting efficiency and making a growing ADC more difficult and costly to support. VitalCaring initially adopted Smart Scheduling to maintain performance while providing support for their back-office workers and ended up with a key to unlocking a more regional operating model. 

Action 

VitalCaring considers HCHB a core part of its operational infrastructure. When exploring scheduling automation, leadership prioritized solutions embedded directly within HCHB rather than bolted-on tools. 

Smart Scheduling stood out because it: 

• Is embedded in existing HCHB workflows 

• Drives higher adoption through familiarity and trust 

• Supports both back-office efficiency and field productivity 

• Scales consistently across branches 

HCHB and VitalCaring partnered together to execute an implementation plan that treated Smart Scheduling as an operational shift, not just a technology deployment. The first 60 days required intentional schedule rebalancing to align with VitalCaring’s goals for the product. Clinicians and staff grew to trust the system, and early transition challenges resolved without ongoing disruption. The agency started off implementation with a small number of locations, increasing to 18 live branches as it started to realize the ability to regionalize and scale the scheduling team. 

Results 

VitalCaring’s schedulers can each support more patients than they used to, causing a natural shift from localized to regional scheduling. The agency has been able to adjust its staffing model by reducing new scheduling hires. Overtime, Smart Scheduling automation allowed the agency to manage workloads equivalent to 10 full-time schedulers. This regional scheduling model has resulted in an estimated $700,000 in annual savings based on costs associated with compensation and benefits. These savings prompted VitalCaring to almost double the number of branches utilizing Smart Scheduling in December 2025. 

VitalCaring prides itself on excellent scheduling practices, maintaining great performance and efficiency and supporting staff with tools that increase their capacity. By adding Smart Scheduling, the agency has replaced 400 staff hours per week with automation, performing an average of over 7,100 tasks each week across more than 30 branches.  

Operational impact

• 10 fewer scheduling and administrative roles required  

• $700,000 in estimated annual savings 

• Shift from local schedulers to a regional scheduling model 

Time and task efficiency

• 400 weekly staff hours shifted from manual tasks to automated workflows 

• Over 7,100 Average weekly tasks across over 30 branches 

• On track to automate over 228,000 visits through Smart Scheduling in 2026 

In Their Own Words: What VitalCaring Says About Smart Scheduling  

Strong partnerships between agencies and their technology providers are built on trust. Below, VitalCaring shares their experience with Smart Scheduling in their own words. 

What made you decide to adopt HCHB’s Smart Scheduling

“We are big fans of HCHB and believe it is a critical part of our infrastructure.  Anytime we can add features within HCHB rather than bolting something onto the core we find that adoption and effectiveness rise exponentially.  As a result, when we began to seek scheduling automation, HCHB was our first choice.   

Once again, HCHB delivered. Their Smart Scheduling tool is improving our operational efficiency in the back office while also helping us deliver on our goals for field staff productivity and clinical optimization.  We continue to expand our deployment of Smart Scheduling and are seeing enhanced efficiency and effectiveness with each deployment.”  

How has HCHB supported your Smart Scheduling journey?

“The team at HCHB has been so helpful along our journey of deployment.  Like anything in technology, ensuring your data is clean is one of the keys to automation success. HCHB helped us understand the key fields that must be accurately maintained to make the most of the solution, stayed in close communication, and responded quickly to our needs along the way. The implementation team is as committed to our success as we are.”  

What were your original goals for Smart Scheduling? What are your goals now?

“Our organization has always been highly focused on productivity and optimization and were happy with our scheduler’s efficiency. Our hope for Smart Scheduling was to maintain our strong results with less effort from the back-office staff. Smart Scheduling has helped us regionalize our scheduling efforts and dramatically increase the patient case load that each scheduler can effectively manage.”   

What has been the most significant improvement for your agency?

“As we expanded our adoption of Smart Scheduling, we realized that we were saving time equivalent to multiple full time employees. After we implemented Smart Scheduling at 18 branches, we realized that our Smart Scheduling staffing matrix required 10 less full time schedulers and admin personnel compared to our non-Smart Scheduling staffing matrix. We recently increased the number of locations using Smart Scheduling to over 30 branches, so we are expecting this number to continue to improve over time as we free up time for schedulers to manage more patients.”   

Smart Scheduling is saving you an estimated 400 hours a week. How has this affected your staffing model?

“Smart Scheduling is saving us time equivalent to 10 full-time employees. It’s important to note that these efficiencies were achieved through natural attrition and reduced hiring rather than layoffs, but ultimately the fact that we’ve been able to accomplish the same amount of work, meeting the same performance requirements with 10 fewer people is remarkable.  

We have changed our staffing matrix as a result of the tool producing true cost savings.”   

How much money have you saved by not needing schedulers at every branch?

“When we blend the cost compensation and benefits for clinical and non-clinical personnel, we get an average of $70,000 per employee.  

That means Smart Scheduling helps us save around $700,000 annually. That’s money we can re-invest in other areas of the business.”   

How does Smart Scheduling perform? Does it follow best practices for scheduling? 

“We already had good management of the scheduling function and the productivity and optimization, but I can say the data shows that Smart Scheduling is aligned with our requirements for productivity and optimization. It complements our processes and allows us to increase scheduler bandwidth while maintaining high performance for LUPA and outlier management as well as timely initiation of care. We have been able to re-focus our schedulers on the nuanced situations that require human intervention, while increasing their bandwidth to manage the scheduling process by over 15%. 

Best practices for scheduling at our agency may not be the same for other agencies, but Smart Scheduling can be customized to focus on what you want to change. You can also experiment to find the right balance for your team. For example, our professional optimization was already above 65%, so we decided to weigh our Smart Scheduling algorithm slightly in favor of productivity. This approach allowed us to increase our average capped productivity by nearly a full point for our RNs and just over 2 points for our PT/OT/ST teams, while maintaining high optimization levels (57% for RNs and 62% for PT/OT/ST).  We were already at a fairly high productivity level so we are pleasantly surprised to see that Smart Scheduling helped us improve our results even further.”  

How has Smart Scheduling affected staff satisfaction (both office and field workers)

“Changing scheduling processes has a very big impact on a large portion of your staff so it takes a little time for the staff to get used to. You have to go through a transition period where you create intentional patient discontinuity so that you can re-align your efforts into a stronger approach to territory management, which is hard for clinicians, especially in the first 60 days. However, once it gets into a well-defined approach, the transition issues resolve themselves and the clinicians come to trust and accept the solution.”    

What would you tell an agency considering Smart Scheduling?

“It is essential that you let the system do its work, especially at the beginning. Make sure your workers are set up properly and minimize overrides. If the human schedulers override the system heavily during the first 60 days, it causes transition issues to extend and can create negative attitudes. Explain what will happen thoroughly in advance to both patients/families and employees and then let the system make the needed adjustments. If you accept this approach, then you will see benefits in the second 60 day window. We followed this approach and now Smart Scheduling automates an average of over 7,100 tasks for us each week.”