Home care has become a logistics business – and most providers aren’t built for it
Every cancelled visit sets off a chain reaction of schedule changes, travel adjustments and workforce decisions. During a recent DCM Group webinar, industry leaders argued the future of home care won’t be determined by who recruits the most staff, but by who coordinates them most effectively.
Home care providers think they’re in the care business. Increasingly, they’re in the logistics business.
Every day providers coordinate hundreds of care workers across hundreds of homes while balancing travel times, client preferences, continuity of care and last-minute cancellations. Unlike residential aged care, where care is delivered from a single location, every client’s home is effectively its own workplace.
The idea emerged during a recent DCM Group webinar on artificial intelligence, where speakers argued the bigger opportunity isn’t simply adopting new technology, but changing the way home care is organised.
For John Staines, Chief Information Officer at Benetas, which recently implemented The Lookout Way’s care management platform following an extensive review of the market, modern home care is “a very large orchestration exercise”.
“It’s not just about the visits,” he said.
“It’s about getting the right staff and the right travel activities to actually perform that. The complexity comes because all of those things are actually interdependent.”
Every cancellation has a cost
The challenge becomes obvious once a provider reaches scale.
Benetas delivers up to 1,000 care activities each day and can manage around 200 schedule changes within 24 hours. Every cancellation, sick call or urgent request ripples through the day’s schedule.
“We need intelligent automation and AI to reshuffle the deck chairs, replan routes and reorganise resources,” John said during the webinar.
Replacing a cancelled visit isn’t simply about finding another available worker. Providers need the right person, with the right skills, at the right time, while keeping travel efficient and ensuring clients continue seeing familiar faces.
“Clients develop preferences,” John said in a follow-up interview.
“We make sure they get their preferred care worker.”
Where productivity disappears
Benetas spent almost two years reviewing how work moved through the organisation before selecting The Lookout Way. John said the process exposed how much time was being consumed by administration rather than care.
“The majority of systems out there are still just data entry systems,” he said.
Instead of helping organisations respond to change, many still rely on administrators manually rebuilding schedules whenever circumstances shift.
Tate Johnson, Chief Technology Officer at The Lookout Way, said the biggest challenge is information moving between disconnected systems.
“The biggest problem in orchestration is the communication and sharing of information,” he said.
When scheduling, care management and finance systems don’t communicate effectively, staff compensate by entering information multiple times, making phone calls and manually updating schedules.
“There’s basically leakage everywhere because every individual decision that’s being made leaks along the way,” Tate said.
Those lost minutes quickly become hours that could otherwise be spent supporting clients.
A different way to run home care
Technology wasn’t the starting point for Benetas.
The first step was identifying where staff were losing time.
The organisation redesigned scheduling, travel planning and client allocation before introducing greater automation. Rather than rebuilding rosters manually, schedules and travel plans are updated automatically as circumstances change, while staff continue making the final decisions.
“The people in the loop aren’t going away,” John said.
“The AI will recompute all of the visits. The person in the loop makes sure we’ve still got the right preferences of care workers to clients and then accepts the reschedule.”
For Tate, providers shouldn’t simply add AI to existing systems. They should rethink how work is organised.
“It’s not, ‘How do you put AI into your organisation?’” he said.
“It’s more: imagine these capabilities now exist. How would you redesign your workflow?”
The next competitive advantage
For years, the home care conversation has centred on workforce shortages. The webinar suggested the next competitive advantage may be something different: how effectively providers coordinate the workforce they already have.
As demand continues to grow and funding becomes tighter, providers need to create more time from existing teams. That means removing unnecessary administration and manual scheduling so staff can spend more time delivering care.
The business behind home care is becoming increasingly defined by logistics. The providers that succeed over the next decade may not simply be those with the largest workforce. They’ll be the ones that make the best use of it.
