You Don’t Need Your Emr: Inside The Next Phase Of Home-based Care

Sixty-eight minutes.

That’s the new magic number at Caring Seasons Health, a home-based care provider out of Fort Mill, South Carolina.

With their old EMR, the team at Caring Seasons spent three to four hours doing admission. With their new AI system from Tallio, they’re down to 68 minutes. Tasks that were running 30 to 90 minutes are now taking 10 to 15. EMR updates that used to take three months are happening in hours or even minutes.

“This system from Tallio — this is an actual assistant,” says Rhonda Oakes, Director of Clinical Operations at Caring Seasons. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The operating system naturally incorporates the required regulatory elements as I navigate the nursing process, allowing me to focus on what matters most, the person in front of me.”

Tallio is a health care technology company that is introducing the concept of turning home-based care providers into AI-native agencies. Their tagline, “You no longer need an EMR,” is a bold proclamation that might rub some as either an exaggeration or a scary truth.

Oakes understands if you think it’s the latter. She disagrees if you think it’s the former.

“What was the original intent of the electronic medical record, or electronic health record?” Oakes says. “It was a tool that was supposed to provide excellent clinical workflow that seamlessly aligned regulatory outcomes that would help us maintain compliance by providing an instrument for capturing data at the bedside. So if that is what an EMR should be, it missed the mark, as most have created compliance documentation that interrupts clinical care.”

The system from Tallio makes compliance an automatic byproduct of clinical excellence. So while Oakes was trained to think of data collection in hospice and home-based care as “painting the picture” of the patient, Tallio vastly reduces the time spent doing the painting, as it were.

“I can complete the admission process in 68 minutes,” she says. “And I can paint that picture, my narrative summation of ‘why hospice, why now,’ from my clinical findings in five minutes.”

How AI can reduce documentation time by 75%

Oakes raises a key point about the origin of an EMR. For decades, EMRs promised efficiency. They delivered clicks, forms and fragmentation dressed as innovation.

Yet what started as tools to streamline care became barriers to it.

Margins are shrinking. Compliance is reactive. Clinicians spend more time documenting than caring. Add-on solutions only patched the symptoms, adding even more fragmentation.

Every layer has added complexity and cost. The system has grown heavier, not smarter. This isn’t a workflow problem — it’s a foundation problem. And you can’t fix a broken foundation by building on top of it.

“In the 1990s, paper charts were all we had,” says Matt Challberg, founder and CEO of Tallio. “They couldn’t scale, so the industry moved to EMRs. That moved the work from paper to screens, but the process itself did not change. It simply turned paper complexity into digital complexity.”

Now, Tallio is bringing artificial intelligence into that compliance and data-capturing space. These AI-native agencies achieve reductions in documentation time of 75% or more, with near-perfect clean claim rates. These care providers, such as Caring Seasons, aren’t using AI-fueled EMRs. They are using AI to replace their EMR entirely.

“With Tallio, instead of working for the machine, the machine is actually working for you,” Oakes says. “And you can actually take your strengths, your true talents, the reasons why you wanted to be in the post-acute care setting, and do the work you want to do.”

Every year, the tide of AI rises higher, automating tasks that once required manual work. Billing, QA, compliance, intake, documentation, scheduling — one by one, providers are starting to use AI to handle those tasks. This leaves two areas that AI won’t replace. First is leadership, meaning the vision, direction and strategy that guide the agency forward.
Second is care: the human connection at the bedside.

“Yes, this might scare people, but they have to realize what we realize: that you are relevant,” Oakes says. “You bring so much value to your team. The way you’re going to do it will be different. Imagine what a nurse, a social worker, a clinician can do if they don’t have to worry about the minutia. They can just focus on what they became — and that means they can offer the patient and their family so much more.”

The shift from EMR to the AI Operating System is the next industry evolution, similar to the move from paper to the EMR. What’s next, is up to you.

This Views article is sponsored by Tallio, and is adapted from their new AI-Native Agency Guide. To download the free guide, click here.

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