How Compassus Is Transforming Home Health Intake With Ai

In home health, a single patient referral can arrive buried in dozens of pages, spread across fax machines, emails and disconnected platforms. Compassus is addressing the intake challenge with an AI platform that reduces intake time from roughly an hour to under 10 minutes – and allows the company to capture more referrals.

The Tennessee-based home health and hospice provider worked with a developer to build its AI-powered intake program, which it is currently rolling out across its organization. The new tool enables faster response times for patients, improves the worker experience and differentiates Compassus from other home health providers, according to Evan Kramer, senior vice president of innovation and operational excellence at Compassus.

“We wanted to make it a strategic advantage of ours,” Kramer told Home Health Care News. “It’s faster response times for patients. It’s better job satisfaction for our teams. … And our health system partners really benefit from this, because they get a much faster response, and they get actually a much more reliable response, than they may have gotten from anyone in the past.”

From a hospital system perspective, it is critical that home health agencies follow through on referrals they accept. Yet with manual intake processes, agencies often accept referrals only to realize later a patient sits outside their service area – meaning they have to reject the referral, Kramer said. 

The new AI platform monitors each source from which referrals could come and compiles them into one place. This means the administrative team only needs to look in one place, rather than 10 potential sources. AI agents next check several factors to ensure a referral could be a fit, such as zip code and insurance. The AI technology combs through 60 to 80 pages of referral documents and performs these checks all at once, Kramer said, condensing about an hour of work to 10 minutes or less. The platform also includes a workflow tool that coordinates other intake-related tasks, he said.

“It’s a huge time saver, not only for our team, but we’re speeding up care for patients too,” Kramer said. “So instead of having a patient sitting in the hospital waiting for the decision on whether or not they’ve been admitted to home care, we can get back to our partners as close to instantly as you can in this process.”

Brentwood, Tennessee-based Compassus provides home health, home infusion, palliative and hospice services, among other in-home offerings. The Towerbrook Capital Partners-backed company employs over 10,000 people and operates more than 300 programs.

A “people-centric” development process

To build its new AI program, Compassus partnered with an AI developer to build an in-house intake platform. There is no other tool like it on the market, according to Kramer. Intake products that do exist are not enterprise-ready, he said, nor would they meet Compassus’ specific needs.

“This is a really big priority for us, so we wanted to move fast on it, and rather than waiting for it to be commercialized somewhere else,” he said.

Work on the tool began in the summer of 2025. At the beginning of 2026, Compassus launched a pilot program. Now, with a completed pilot and the technology live in two states for about three months, the company is rolling it out across the enterprise.

Complicating the development process was the large number of potential referral sources – from faxes to emails. The development team had to build an integration for each of these portals and then integrate the tool with the electronic medical record (EMR).

The development process was iterative and designed in a “people-centric” way. The team knew the initial program would not be perfect and planned for a rapid iteration cycle, leveraging user feedback to enhance the tool over three months. Enhancements, of which there were about 25 to 30, included creating a mobile application for the growth team to make the tool easier and more accessible.

Measuring success

The new intake process is a boon in several ways. Substantial time savings are a key benefit.

“With hospital systems, they’ll blast out a referral to like 10 different places, and whoever says yes to it first gets it,” Kramer said. “We would miss out on those a lot of times, because we wanted to be really diligent in our process, and we didn’t want to tell them that we could take it unless we were sure. But others may have given a quicker answer in that way. So we’re seeing the number of missed referrals drop down quite a bit in our pilot markets.”

In these pilot markets, the number of missed referrals dropped by about 22%, Kramer said.

Timely initiation of care also improved, with an increase of about 6% in pilot markets. User satisfaction is also high, Kramer said, with about 80% of users reporting that they are very satisfied with the intake tool.

All these time savings represent a growth opportunity for Compassus.

“Our nurses are able to spend more time with patients than they were before because they have less of a documentation burden,” Kramer said. “We’re capturing more referrals than we were before. So by definition, we’re growing there. A lot of these team members that were doing this manual data entry, a lot of them are clinicians. A lot of them were really working at the bottom of their license there. … We’re elevating these folks to be able to work on more cognitive, more challenging, more value-added tasks and automate the data entry and automate the zip code checks and all that kind of stuff.”

Compassus plans to continue executing on its AI roadmap, which focuses on administrative tasks and is planned out through the end of 2027. Automating administrative tasks can elevate care and improve efficiency, Kramer said, and there is a significant opportunity to leverage AI in home health.

“If you look at our roadmap, there’s intake, scheduling, engagement,” he said. “There are all of these things that the whole industry can be moving towards, and I think we’re very early in that journey right now.”

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