AccentCare had a problem. And they knew how rare it would be to find their solution.

A recognized national leader in home-based care services, the Dallas-based AccentCare faced many of the same challenges that keep their fellow home-based care providers up at night. Thin margins. Operational pressures. Caregiver turnover. EVV compliance. And the compounding problems of inefficient scheduling and coordination.

“We needed a partner who could attack all of those at once, at the scale we operate at,” says Joanna Ciampaglione, Senior Vice President and GM of AccentCare. “Caribou has delivered.”

“Delivered” is no small potatoes. AccentCare’s results with Caribou included a 40% reduction in shift-booking time and a 20% increase in 90-day caregiver retention.

And then there’s this.

“Since deploying their platform, we’ve seen over 640% ROI, with measurable gains in retention, EVV compliance, and coordination efficiency,” Ciampaglione says.

Here is a look at how they did it.

Why AccentCare turned to Caribou: data from over 250,000 caregivers — and verifiable results

The New York City-based Caribou Health Technologies isn’t the only provider of technology solutions for home-based care. But there were two edges that Caribou brought to AccentCare’s needs. One was what Ciampaglione said: attacking all of those problems at once, and at scale.

The second was something that Ciampaglione knew was rare, if it was even available elsewhere: verified data.

“What ultimately sealed the deal for us to partner with Caribou were the results and the fact that we could verify them,” she says. “Caribou had a track record with other enterprise, multi-state home care operators, and when we talked to those operators, the outcomes held up. That mattered to us. A lot of vendors can show a deck. Far fewer can put us on the phone with peers who’ve already lived the implementation.”

Data verification wasn’t simply coming from a handful of satisfied customers. Caribou’s system, called “Conductor,” draws from over 170 million touchpoints with caregivers over the past eight years — a pool of more than 250,000 caregivers nationwide, including more than 50,000 using Caribou’s shift booking solution. When a home-based care provider needs to tackle one of the challenges that Ciampaglione laid out, such as filling a shift, the Caribou Conductor produces a list of recommended caregivers and handles the booking of that shift from end to end.

“Shift coordination impacts everyone in the home care ecosystem,” says Alex Oosterveen, Co-Founder and CEO of Caribou. “When it works well, agencies, caregivers and families thrive. When it’s broken, it hurts everyone at once.”

Caribou knows what care coordinators face. They’re managing open shifts, trying to maintain client relationships, and doing it all while manually calling down a list of caregivers they hope are available. It’s reactive, time-consuming, and mentally exhausting. Context gets lost. Calls go unanswered.

Caregivers feel it too.

“Most want more stable hours, with quality shifts that match their skills, their schedule and their preferences,” Oosterveen says. “But they don’t always know how to get them. The best thing an agency can do for a caregiver is hand them a shift that fits their preferences. Many agencies don’t have a system to do that at scale.”

That’s what Caribou did for AccentCare. Caribou Conductor has multiple parts, all working together, such as Caribou Shift Booking and Caribou Rewards, the latter of which consistently achieves over 95% frontline engagement.

“We know what motivates caregivers, how they communicate, and what makes them show up,” Oosterveen says.

At AccentCare, adoption was swift. With so many caregivers, schedulers and families affected, that ease matters.

“Easy adoption means clean data, and clean data means we actually trust what the platform is telling us,” Ciampaglione says. “Caribou’s operating mindset was the final piece. They think like operators, not like a software vendor.”

Inside the numbers: what AccentCare gains from Caribou

AccentCare has had a game-changing experience from Caribou’s Conductor system. The numbers back it up, with measurable results across several metrics:

• Caribou referrals have brought in over 750 new hires
• Shift booking time dropped by more than 40%
• 90-day caregiver retention increased by as much as 20%
• In one state, training rewards powered by the Caribou-Nevvon integration increased training completion percentage by 30%
• Because Caribou Rewards and Caribou Shift Booking operate together, AccentCare can seamlessly offer incentives for hard-to-fill shifts, like last-minute call-outs or weekends

“We haven’t seen another partner move the needle the way Caribou has across all four of engagement, retention, EVV and coordination,” Ciampaglione says.

“Caribou is different because we started with the caregiver,” Oosterveen says. “Home care is heading toward a future where demand outpaces the workforce. Agencies that win will retain the caregivers they have, fill shifts before they become a crisis, and do more without growing their back office. That requires AI that understands caregivers at a deep level.”

“What excites us most is where Caribou is going,” Ciampaglione says. “Their technology takes on some of the genuinely hard, operationally complex problems in home care — the kinds of things we’ve historically had to throw headcount and process at. They’re building toward solutions we want to be early on. We’ve already seen meaningful results from what’s deployed today, and we see Caribou helping us continue to grow without expanding our back office.”

This Views article is sponsored by Caribou. To learn more, visit caribou.care.