By Thomas A. Parmalee
For most home care agency owners, the hardest part of the business isn’t necessarily finding clients.
It is making sure the right caregiver is in the right home at the right time — and dealing with everything that happens when that plan inevitably changes.
For instance, on any given day, the following may sound familiar to you:
- A caregiver calls out at midnight.
- A client is being discharged from the hospital late on a Friday afternoon.
- Someone forgets to clock in.
- A family member calls with a question.
- A caregiver is running 30 minutes late.
- A new client inquiry comes in while the office is already dealing with three other problems.
If you’ve been in this business long enough, you probably already know that there will be times when the phone doesn’t ring.
And then there will be other times when it keeps ringing. The schedule keeps changing. And somebody must deal with it.
“Scheduling is the heart of home care business,” said David Knack (pictured at top with the microphone), head of sales at Zingage. “Can you get them to clients reliably?”
That question is at the center of what Zingage, an AI platform founded in 2023, is trying to address.
The company describes itself as an AI platform that handles scheduling, engagement and operations, so home care agencies can grow without having to grow their back office at the same rate. Its platform includes Riley, an AI receptionist; Casey, an AI scheduling and operations coordinator; and Zingage Perform, an engagement and retention system for caregivers. Zingage says it is now used by more than 500 home care agencies.
But Knack’s explanation of the company’s purpose goes beyond simply automating administrative tasks.
The bigger idea, he said, is to make it possible for a home care agency to operate 24/7 without requiring its people to be available 24/7.
“Even if it is 24/7 business, it shouldn’t be a 24/7 job,” Knack said.
The Problem Started with Personal Experience
Zingage’s origins are rooted in experiences with home care that its founders had before they began building the company.
Zingage was founded in 2023 by Victor Hunt and Daniel Tian.
Hunt’s grandmother was a nurse who started a home care agency of her own. She eventually shut it down and returned to working in a hospital, an experience that left Hunt wondering what could be designed differently to make operating a home care business easier.
Tian’s connection was even more immediate. His grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Tian found himself involved in managing his care. He saw caregivers constantly turning over and witnessed firsthand how difficult that was for the quality and continuity of care. His grandfather was from China, adding language barriers to an already complicated situation.
Those experiences led to a fundamental question: How could technology help home care agencies deliver more consistent, seamless care?
Knack joined the company shortly after its founding. He had previously worked at another AI startup serving the senior living market and had already spent enough time talking with home care operators to become interested in the industry. He met Hunt online and joined Zingage in December 2023, about six months after the company began.
What he found was an industry with a very obvious problem — caregiver turnover — but a less obvious underlying opportunity.
The Turnover Problem May Start Somewhere Else
Home care operators hear about caregiver churn constantly. It is one of the industry’s defining challenges.
But Knack argues that agencies sometimes focus so heavily on recruiting that they overlook another way of attacking the problem: improving the day-to-day experience of working for the agency.
Zingage surveyed caregivers who used its tools and found two complaints standing out: Caregivers did not feel they were getting enough hours, and they often had difficulty getting in touch with someone in the office.
“Everyone tells you the biggest problem is churn,” Knack said. “We need more caregivers. We need to recruit all the time.”
But his observation is that operational excellence can itself become a retention strategy.
“One of the biggest things home care agencies can do to combat turnover is deliver an excellent operational product to clients and caregivers,” he said.
That means answering the phone, responding quickly and handling callouts in a way that doesn’t cause chaos. It also means making sure caregivers have access to the information and support they need.
And it means recognizing that the person answering a 2 a.m. call is also a human being who eventually needs to sleep.
The Call-Out That Ruins Saturday Morning
Consider the caregiver call-out.
Every agency has experienced it. A caregiver is sick … or their child is sick … or maybe their car won’t start. Whatever the reason, the agency has an uncovered shift.
The problem isn’t merely finding another caregiver.
The coordinator may have to determine who is qualified to work with a particular client, who is available, whether the caregiver has worked with that client before, what state regulations permit, what the client’s care plan requires and whether the client or family needs to be contacted.
“If you get the schedule wrong, consequences are real and deep,” Knack said.
And the timing is rarely convenient.
The call-out may leave an administrator lying awake wondering who will cover the shift. Or it might come on Saturday morning and turn what should have been a normal weekend into an emergency staffing exercise.
Situations like that are why Knack emphasizes Zingage does a lot more than save agencies time and money—it also provides relief.
“Being able to have the phone ring and not have a spike in cortisol because you think it will be a callout is a huge benefit,” he said.
That speaks to an issue that doesn’t always show up neatly on a balance sheet: the emotional burden carried by agency owners and office staff.
The reality is that home care administrators absorb complaints, last-minute changes, caregiver frustrations and emergencies throughout the day. If technology can handle some of those interactions, employees can spend their time and attention on the situations that genuinely require human judgment.
Riley And Casey Are Designed to Work Together
Zingage’s approach is different from simply putting a chatbot on a home care agency’s website.
The company’s current platform is built around specialized AI agents. Riley serves as the voice and communications layer, while Casey handles scheduling and operational work. Zingage says Riley can answer calls, route urgent matters, access information in an agency’s electronic medical record and alert staff when human intervention is needed. Casey can match caregivers to open shifts, handle callouts, confirm visits and update the EMR.
The distinction matters because a home care problem rarely ends when somebody answers the phone.
Suppose a caregiver does not clock in for their 1 p.m. shift. According to Knack, Zingage can contact the caregiver, determine what happened and learn that the caregiver is stuck in traffic and will arrive at 1:30 p.m.
The system can then determine whether the caregiver is willing to stay an extra 30 minutes at the end of their shift to make up the lost time, contact the client with an update, document what happened and record the information in the scheduling system.
Those are all individual tasks that traditionally would fall to a coordinator.
The same concept applies to a callout. Zingage can initiate outreach, evaluate potential replacement caregivers and account for factors that can make home care scheduling considerably more complicated than simply finding someone who is free.
The company’s website describes the process as a sequence that includes documenting the callout, checking the client’s requirements, ranking caregivers according to skills and availability, conducting outreach, assigning the shift, updating the EMR and notifying the appropriate parties.
That last piece is important to Knack: The work doesn’t simply disappear into an AI system. It is documented in the agency’s system of record.
Zingage Isn’t Trying to Replace the EMR
One of the questions Knack said Zingage encountered frequently in its early days was whether it was intended to replace established home care software.
Increasingly, he said, agencies understand the distinction.
The EMR or scheduling platform remains the system of record — where the agency maintains documentation, billing and other core information. But there is a substantial amount of work happening outside those systems.
“There’s a huge amount of work that occurs outside of that,” Knack said. “That’s where we engage and supplement the work that other people do.”
That positioning is one of the company’s important differentiators.
Zingage’s goal isn’t necessarily to rip out the software an agency already relies upon. Instead, its AI agents operate around that existing infrastructure and interact with it.
The company says its agents can update schedules, write notes and perform other actions in real time. Its website describes the platform as an operational layer that works with existing systems rather than simply another point solution.
Knack compared the experience to a self-driving car.
“You can hit the brake,” he said. “And you can grab the steering wheel.”
That philosophy is important because not every agency wants AI handling every interaction.
Some owners may be comfortable having AI communicate directly with caregivers. Others may want a human to handle particular situations. Zingage can configure its system accordingly, with guardrails determining what the AI can and cannot do.
Knack said that agencies often begin with a relatively narrow view of where AI belongs. As they gain confidence in what the technology can handle, however, that scope can expand.
The Goal Isn’t to Eliminate People
That distinction gets to the heart of Zingage’s pitch.
The company’s argument isn’t that home care agencies should eliminate their human staff. It is that people should spend more of their time on the work that requires people.
Knack pointed to the example of a high-quality lead arriving at 4 p.m. on a Friday, just as the office is preparing to close.
There are also the hundreds of routine calls that consume staff time without necessarily requiring a coordinator’s expertise.
One Zingage customer, Knack said, received roughly 400 inbound calls over a holiday weekend. The AI handled 375 of them end-to-end, including the required documentation and changes, while 25 reached members of the agency’s staff.
Zingage’s website likewise positions Riley as a 24/7 front desk capable of answering calls and routing matters requiring human attention.
For Knack, the number of calls handled isn’t the only metric.
The bigger question is what the agency’s employees were able to do because they weren’t handling those calls.
An owner might spend more time meeting referral partners. An administrator might leave the office on time. A manager might finally attend a community event. Someone who has given up a hobby because the agency constantly needs them might get some of that personal time back.
“The biggest ROI potential is if you and your team are not on stuff that Zingage can do,” Knack said.
Taking Aim at the Other Side of the Turnover Problem
Zingage’s focus on caregivers doesn’t end with scheduling.
Its Perform platform is designed around engagement and retention. The company’s website notes that key features include automated recognition and rewards, caregiver surveys, retention alerts based on engagement patterns, compliance incentives and a communication hub.
The reasoning is straightforward.
Home care has become an increasingly distributed workforce. Caregivers may rarely see one another or the people running the agency. Older mechanisms for creating connections picking up a paper check, dropping off a timesheet or stopping by the office — have largely disappeared as agencies adopted electronic scheduling and direct deposit.
That creates an engagement problem.
Agencies may have employee-of-the-month programs, newsletters or holiday parties, but those efforts can be sporadic and manual. Knack said agencies are often good at recognizing the caregiver who performs some extraordinary act to solve a crisis.
But there are thousands of caregivers doing their jobs reliably every day.
Zingage wanted to recognize that consistency, too.
“We wanted a rewards program to recognize consistency and not just the last hero to save them the day,” Knack said.
Built for the Reality That No Two Agencies Are Alike
Another challenge Zingage is attempting to address is the enormous variation among home care agencies.
“If you’ve seen one home care agency, you’ve seen one home care agency,” Knack said.
An agency serving a rural market may operate very differently from one in a dense metropolitan area. The populations served differ. Caregiver pools differ. Client diagnoses differ. Some agencies have large virtual-assistant teams. Others have very different staffing structures.
Zingage therefore doesn’t envision a single rigid AI workflow being imposed on every customer.
The company’s pricing model is also designed around variability. Zingage says customers pay based on AI-handled call minutes, completed tasks and successful staffing outcomes rather than a conventional flat seat license.
Knack said Zingage’s smallest customer bills about 100 hours a week, while its largest is at approximately 100,000 billable hours per week.
That range matters because home care revenue can fluctuate considerably while many administrative costs remain fixed.
The objective, Knack said, is to make the technology “built to scale for your business.”
From Technology to an Operational Partner
For Knack, the evolution of Zingage is ultimately less about artificial intelligence as a technology and more about what an agency can accomplish when routine operational work no longer requires a human response every time.
Implementation, he said, can take roughly two weeks from an initial inquiry to deciding to move forward to using the system.
Zingage’s ambition extends beyond one scheduling problem or one AI receptionist.
The company’s platform now describes three connected components: Riley as the voice layer, Casey as the operations engine and Perform as the caregiver engagement system. Zingage says the agents are designed to collaborate, with Riley’s interactions capable of triggering operational work by Casey.
That is an important distinction from the way many home care operators have historically thought about software.
Traditional software primarily records what happened.
Zingage is trying to build technology that actually does something about what is happening — and when something genuinely requires a human being, the objective is to bring a person into the process rather than bury the problem under another automated workflow.
For a home care owner, that distinction could be the most important one.
The promise isn’t simply fewer phone calls or fewer administrative tasks. It is the possibility of building an agency where the business can continue operating when the owner isn’t awake, the administrator isn’t at a desk, and the office isn’t fully staffed.
Or, as Knack puts it, the goal is to allow home care operators to focus their human attention where it creates the most value — while letting AI handle more of the operational machinery required to deliver the care.
