This article is sponsored by CareBestie. As home health agencies work to improve patient experience, many are still being held back by communication gaps, manual coordination, and limited visibility into what patients need between visits. CareBestie is focused on closing those gaps, helping providers create a more connected, responsive experience from referral through discharge and beyond. In this Voices interview, Daniel Haven, CEO of CareBestie, shares why communication remains such a persistent challenge in home health, where agencies are losing time and trust, and what will separate the organizations that get patient engagement right in 2026.

Home Health Care News: What core experience shaped the way you view home-based care technology today?

Daniel Haven: I came into this from cybersecurity, so it was a very different world. There, we were solving complex problems at scale, but the impact was often more abstract. In home health, it’s immediate. You’re dealing with real patients, real families and real consequences when things break down.

What surprised me wasn’t the care itself. The care is strong. What stood out was everything around it, the coordination, the communication and what happens between visits. That’s where so much of the friction lives, and it’s also where technology has the greatest opportunity to help.

Scheduling is where the problem shows up most clearly, but underneath it is a broader visibility gap across the patient journey. When we looked at the data, it became clear that a large portion of patient interactions isn’t clinical. More than a third is tied to scheduling, and more than half of interactions surface something actionable.

Over time, that changed the way I thought about communication. It isn’t just an operational function. It’s a signal. If you structure it properly, it can tell you what’s changing with a patient, where support is breaking down and how care should be delivered more effectively. That’s really what shaped the way I view home-based care technology today.

Why is communication still so inconsistent in home health, especially when patients often do not know what happens next, when their clinician is coming, who is coming or whether anything has changed?

I think it’s less about something being broken and more about how the system is structured. Home health is highly distributed. You have clinicians in the field, schedulers, branch staff and multiple handoffs happening throughout the day. Patients feel that fragmentation, even when the teams involved are doing good work.

If you look at the data, around a third of interactions relate to scheduling and coordination. Patients are asking very simple questions: When are you coming? Who is coming? Did something change? Scheduling is the most visible category, but we also consistently see clinical follow-up needs, symptom changes and supply gaps surface through those same conversations.

What often gets underestimated is how willing patients are to engage when communication is proactive and clear. Around 92% of patients engage in these interactions, and about 8% either request or are routed to a human when needed. So this is not about removing the human element. It’s about making sure patients always have a responsive, reliable touchpoint, especially in the moments between visits when uncertainty tends to build.

The first 24 to 48 hours after a referral are often messy, with patients hard to reach, information incomplete and follow-up inconsistent. What typically breaks during that window, and what does it cost agencies?

That first 24 to 48 hours is really about speed and consistency. It’s the point where a referral either starts moving in the right direction or begins to stall, and a lot of what breaks in that window has less to do with clinical readiness than operational follow-through.

We’ve seen that about 55% of patients can be reached within the first hour, and that number can climb to roughly 95% within 30 hours if the outreach is persistent. What’s interesting is how much persistence actually matters. The second attempt roughly doubles connectivity compared to the first, and the third adds another meaningful lift. So this is not just about making one call and hoping for the best.

It’s also not simply a volume game. Timing matters. Number recognition matters. Follow-up matters. Being available when patients call back matters. Agencies are incredibly good at delivering care, but reaching patients consistently at scale is a different kind of operational challenge.

When that part works, the impact is significant. Better connectivity leads to more completed admissions, less leakage and a stronger referral-to-admit conversion rate. We’ve seen examples where admissions moved from roughly 33% of referrals to closer to 70%, which shows just how much this early communication window can affect both patient access and agency performance.

Scheduling and visit coordination generate a large share of inbound calls, yet they still rely heavily on manual processes and back-and-forth communication. Why does this remain such an operational burden?

Scheduling is inherently dynamic. It’s not something you set once and move on from. It shifts constantly based on patient availability, clinician schedules and last-minute changes, and patients naturally want clarity around all of that.

That is why it remains such a heavy operational burden. In the data, about 34% of surfaced issues relate to scheduling, which drives a significant share of inbound calls. The branch ends up becoming a communication hub, going back and forth between patients and clinicians just to keep everyone aligned.

That has a real impact. Scheduling and care coordination teams stay under constant load, clinicians spend time confirming visits instead of focusing on care and agencies deal with missed or ghost visits when the patient is not there. So it’s not just a coordination problem. It’s a cost, efficiency and capacity problem too.

Why is it so difficult for agencies to identify patient dissatisfaction or changing needs before a complaint is made or a situation escalates?

Because dissatisfaction usually doesn’t show up all at once. It builds through smaller gaps, unclear expectations, delayed follow-up and inconsistent communication. By the time it becomes a complaint, the issue has often been building for a while.

When you engage patients consistently, you start to see those signals earlier. More than half of interactions surface something actionable, and most of that is real. What makes it tricky is that many of those signals do not present themselves as formal complaints. They show up as questions, confusion, missed expectations or small breakdowns in coordination.

That is what makes early identification so difficult, but also so important. Many of these signals are not just operational. They often point to deeper coordination or clinical gaps. If agencies can catch them sooner, they have a much better chance to respond before the situation escalates, affects outcomes or turns into a broader patient experience issue.

Once an episode ends, many agencies lose contact with the patient entirely. What opportunities are missed by not staying connected after discharge?

After discharge, communication often stops, but the patient’s situation doesn’t. Needs can change, symptoms can return and new issues can emerge even though the episode itself has ended.

What we’ve observed is that when agencies stay engaged, a meaningful portion of patients surface new or recurring needs. In some cases, up to around 15% of those interactions can be clinically relevant for re-engagement. That creates a very real growth opportunity, but it also does something just as important: it improves continuity and gives agencies a clearer view of what is happening after the formal episode ends.

Without that ongoing connection, you lose both the relationship and the signal. You lose visibility into what the patient may need next, and you lose the chance to respond earlier in a way that supports both patient experience and future care.

Zooming out, what will separate home health agencies that create a more connected, responsive patient experience in 2026 from those that continue to struggle with communication breakdowns?

I think it comes down to consistency, visibility and the ability to act on patient needs in real time.

The agencies that stand out will be the ones that admit a higher percentage of referrals, stay connected to patients beyond the visit and capture issues early instead of reacting later. There is also a clear financial component to that. Patient experience ties directly to HHCAHPS and Value-Based Purchasing, and even small improvements can have an outsized impact on Total Performance Score and ultimately Medicare reimbursement.

At the same time, agencies that communicate more consistently tend to reduce operational strain. They see fewer inbound calls, fewer missed visits and less back-and-forth across teams. We also see that engagement is sustained over time, with around 85% of patients continuing to interact, which turns communication into an ongoing feedback loop rather than a one-time touchpoint.

What that creates is a model where agencies can grow admissions, improve patient satisfaction and re-engage patients over time without scaling headcount in the same way. The agencies that win won’t necessarily have more staff. They’ll have better visibility into their patients and the ability to act on that information consistently.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CareBestie is an AI-powered patient engagement platform built specifically for home health agencies: automating calls and texts with patients from referral to post-discharge, so your team can focus on care, not coordination.

Discover how leading agencies are using CareBestie → carebestie.com.

The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].