- Company
- Heritage Home Care
- Website
- heritagehomecareaz.com
- Scheduling system
- WellSky
- Hired Phoebe
- December 2025
Nate West spent five years as a Marine Corps officer and helped scale a B2B SaaS startup to an exit before he ever set foot in a home care office. Two years ago he bought Heritage Home Care, a high-end boutique agency in Scottsdale, Arizona, inheriting a well-run business that was, in his words, "stuck in the stone age." Today, with Phoebe running shift confirmations, clock-in/out reminders, and shift outreach, one in three missed clock-ins and clock-outs now gets handled before a scheduler ever picks up the phone, alongside no-call/no-shows cut from eight to one and a median shift fill under ten minutes.
"My schedulers have gone from being firefighters to being truly, like, strategic thought partners."
— Nate West, Owner, Heritage Home Care
| Heritage Home Care | |
|---|---|
| Location | Scottsdale, AZ |
| Caregivers | 125+ |
| Typical caregiver | 7 to 8 year CNA |
| EHR | WellSky |
| With Phoebe since | December 2025 |
The Challenge: A Strong Agency Running on Manual Workflows
Heritage came with a real foundation: a strong reputation in Scottsdale, detailed care plans, and a team that spent four to six hours getting to know every client before the first shift. What it did not have was modern tooling. Filling an open shift meant working a call list by hand, one caregiver at a time.
"It was pounding the phones. It was one by one working down the list of, 'These are the 10 that we think would be a good fit that have the availability. Let's leave voicemails for them.'"
And caregivers rarely picked up.
"Our phones ring all day long with spam, so most people just don't answer their phones."
When Nate took over, coverage could come down to the wire.
"When I took over, it was sometimes a twenty-four to forty-eight hour fight."
Shift confirmations were just as manual, so most of the time they simply did not happen.
"Before Phoebe, we weren't really doing confirmations."
The Solution: An AI Scheduling Teammate Across Three Workflows
Heritage kept WellSky and Slack and layered Phoebe on top to handle three jobs: confirming tomorrow's shifts, catching missed clock-ins and clock-outs, and paging out open shifts to the right caregivers. All of it runs over text, the channel caregivers actually respond to.
"We went basically from only calling people to now 80% of our communication with caregivers being via text. Our call volume has dropped significantly."
Phoebe answers caregiver questions straight from the care plan in WellSky, while the scheduler keeps the final call on who gets the shift.
"We just like having that final say, the human touch."
The Results
No-Call/No-Shows Dropped From 8 to 1
Every morning at 9:30, Phoebe texts caregivers to confirm the next day's shifts.
"Phoebe sends out a text every morning at 9:30 to confirm tomorrow's shifts. The caregiver just gives a thumbs up or says, 'I'm good, I'm going.' And we know they're good to go to work."
The impact showed up immediately in the metric that matters most.
"In the first half of 2025, we had eight no-call, no-shows across all of our shifts. We've had one this year in the first half of the year."
Phoebe Handles One in Three Missed Clock-Ins
If a caregiver does not clock in a few minutes after their shift starts, Phoebe texts them, can clock them in directly in WellSky, and only escalates to the office if there is still no response.
"One in three missed clock-ins and clock-outs is now being handled by Phoebe."
"If the caregiver responds and says, 'I got here two minutes ago,' Phoebe will go ahead and handle that clock-in in WellSky, so the caregiver doesn't have to do it, and we never get the notification."
Now a WellSky alert means something: Phoebe already tried and the caregiver did not respond, so the team knows to act fast.
Caregivers Respond in About 7 Minutes
Text-first outreach works because caregivers actually answer it.
"Seven point one minutes is the average response time on any of the texts that go out with Phoebe."
Schedulers Run Three Conversations at Once
Because Phoebe handles the back-and-forth, a single scheduler can do the work of several at the same time.
"It enables a scheduler in my office to be having three conversations at once with three different caregivers via Phoebe."
"Our schedulers can be coordinating a doctor's appointment, confirming a shift, and paging out a new shift all at the exact same time. It's opened up the bandwidth on our team more than I ever could have imagined."
Open Shifts Fill in Under 10 Minutes
Paging out a shift now means Phoebe texts every qualified caregiver at once, answers their questions from the care plan, and hands the scheduler a short list of interested, pre-vetted people.
"These five caregivers had a conversation with Phoebe, and they're interested. Now we can pick which one out of the five makes the most sense for that client."
The result is a 9.7-minute median shift fill, with Phoebe handling roughly 850 shift-fills a week that schedulers no longer have to chase.
"The median shift fill is nine point seven minutes. So in less than ten minutes, we're filling shifts, and that includes both emergency coverage and long-term ongoing shifts."
Staffing Moved From Crisis Mode to Two Weeks Out
With shifts filling fast, the team is no longer staffing tomorrow morning in a panic.
"Now there are times where we're ten, fourteen-plus days out, and it just enables them to be better at their jobs. You're not constantly in firefighter mode."
One Shared Knowledge Base
Every conversation lives in one place, so anyone covering on-call has the full context.
"I can log in to Phoebe right now and have access to all of the same conversations that my entire team does. Everybody has access to the same knowledge base, which is invaluable."
Adoption: Handling the "Why Are You Babysitting Me?" Pushback
A handful of long-tenured caregivers bristled at confirmations at first.
"There were five, six, maybe seven caregivers that were like, 'I've worked for you for five years. I've never missed a shift. Why are you babysitting me now?'"
Nate's answer was context, not coercion: explain the big picture, and tie tool adoption to the caregiver bonus structure.
"We have well over 125 caregivers on our roster. How am I supposed to know that all 80 caregivers who are supposed to work today know they're going to work today?"
The Bottom Line
For Nate, Phoebe has become something his team would not want to give up.
"If I got rid of Phoebe, some of my schedulers would try to go find an agency that has Phoebe, because that's how powerful it's been for them. I honestly might lose employees if I got rid of it."
That is the real shift: not just faster fills, but a scheduling team that finally has room to think ahead instead of fighting fires.