- Company
- Touching Hearts at Home (Denver)
- Scheduling system
- WellSky
- Hired Phoebe
- December 2025
Touching Hearts at Home in the Denver metro area is one of the larger agencies in its franchise network: roughly 150 caregivers, co-owned by Franny Schmidt and Stacey Tabor, and coming up on 13 years in business this October. Heading into a year of growth, the owners faced the standard move of hiring a second scheduler, and passed. They brought in Phoebe instead. Over the last 30 days, Phoebe spent roughly 172 hours on the phone and over text with caregivers, almost exactly the working hours of the full-time hire they never had to make.
"Not having to hire that additional person and all the benefits and the time off and the sick time and the vacation. Phoebe doesn't go on vacation. Phoebe doesn't take time off."
— Franny Schmidt, Co-Owner, Touching Hearts at Home
| Touching Hearts at Home (Denver) | |
|---|---|
| Location | Denver metro, CO |
| Caregivers | ~150 |
| In business | Since 2013 |
| Scheduling | 1 care coordinator |
The Challenge: One Scheduler, 150 Caregivers, and a Phone That Never Stops
Touching Hearts runs lean. Stacey heads strategy and business development, Franny runs operations and administration, a registered nurse serves as VP of Operations overseeing clinical care, and one care coordinator handles most of the scheduling for the entire caregiver roster.
"We have a great care coordinator, but the phone rings off the hook. When you have 150 caregivers calling, they're looking for schedules, they're looking to change a schedule, they're looking for time off. It can be a lot of administrative work for one person to manage."
With the next 12 months hyper-focused on growth, the obvious move was adding a second scheduler. Franny and Stacey decided against it.
"We knew that we were gonna have to expand. And we're very keen on technology and definitely knew that there were going to be tools out in the market that would help us grow without actually having to add another person in the office. That can be a lot of overhead. We made decisions that we'd rather funnel overhead dollars to caregiving dollars, paying our caregivers more."
The Solution: Outreach That Happens All at Once
Stacey sits on the technology task force for the Touching Hearts at Home franchise organization, the group that evaluates tools before recommending them across the network. She had been approached by plenty of vendors making big promises about AI. Phoebe was the one that made it past her.
"We were approached by a lot of people making a lot of promises on what AI was gonna do and save us across the board. And she's very thoughtful when she makes those kinds of decisions. You made it pretty easy to get going."
Instead of a live person working a call list one name at a time, Phoebe now handles the outreach: offering shifts, answering questions, and following up with every qualified caregiver simultaneously.
The Results
172 Hours in 30 Days: A Full-Time Employee's Workload
Measured in hours spent calling and texting caregivers, Phoebe put in roughly 172 hours over the last 30 days, including about 100 hours of phone time alone. That is almost exactly what a full-time hire works in a month, absorbed without adding a desk, a salary, or a benefits package. It is also work no human could do the way Phoebe does it.
"If I need to call 10 caregivers, that's gonna take me an hour. Phoebe can do it all at the same time. It's kind of hard to wrap your brain around."
The scale shows in the coverage. Touching Hearts runs several thousand hours of care a week with one full-time scheduler, a volume where most agencies carry two or three.
76% of Open Shifts Filled, in 20 Minutes on Average
Those hours turn into filled shifts. In a single recent week, the team ran outreach on 85 open shifts through Phoebe.
"She filled seventy-six percent of those, with an average time of twenty minutes. Those are incredible numbers, and just hearing that makes me feel really good about the investment, knowing that she's gonna get better and better and we're gonna get better and better as a result."
A Schedule Cleared Before the Holiday Weekend
The clearest quality-of-life change showed up right before July 4th, the kind of weekend that usually has schedulers and on-call supervisors scrambling.
"Going into this holiday weekend, having our schedule cleared for not only this week and the weekend but all of next week too feels pretty good. It takes a lot of pressure off the scheduler, and it takes a lot of pressure off our on-call supervisors that answer the phone after hours. They're not gonna be scrambling to fill shifts."
The on-call team is trained on Phoebe too, so a last-minute start or a weekend callout gets handled the same way it would on a Tuesday morning.
Time Moved to Ten Dollar Tasks
For Franny, the numbers matter less than what the team does with the hours Phoebe absorbs.
"We always talk about the value of a ten dollar task versus a one dollar task. What Phoebe has done for us is allowed our whole entire team to focus more on those ten dollar tasks."
That means reviewing care logs for changing conditions, recommending additional resources in the home, and making regular check-in calls to clients and caregivers. The effect is showing up where it counts.
"We're seeing a trend in improved client retention, improved caregiver retention, because we're spending our time on the right things."
Caregivers feel it too, starting before they even walk into a visit.
"When Phoebe walks through a care plan for somebody, that makes them feel good going into that visit, just knowing that they know what to do. And if they've got questions, they can ask questions."
Adoption: A Skeptical Scheduler Came Around
Touching Hearts followed the recommended steps to introduce Phoebe to the team, and caregivers have accepted her as part of the organization. They text back, ask questions, and share information knowing Phoebe will remember it. The harder sell was closer to home.
"Our care coordinator, she was a little skeptical, right? She's got relationships, she knows who these caregivers are. But once you get into it, you're like, okay, I can do this. It relieves a lot of stress for everyone."
Now the whole office is cross-training on the tool, and the feedback from the on-call supervisors is the same as the schedulers': they love it.
The Bottom Line
Franny and Stacey are on a group text with leaders of some of the larger, more established franchises in the Touching Hearts network. When one of them asked about Phoebe recently, Stacey could not stop listing reasons to do it.
"Stacey gave a wonderful reason, or lots of wonderful reasons, why to do it. And she's like, okay, one more thing. Okay, one more thing. I promise this will be the last thing. And just on and on about what we're getting to do with Phoebe."
Her advice to owners on the fence is simple.
"Give it a try. Learn it, work with it. It's something different, it's new, and I think the biggest challenge is getting the buy-in from the team. But then once they start getting into the tool, it's been great. I'd tell everybody to do it, because then we're all doing great care."