Your Home Care Agency Spends 3–5 Hours a Day Answering Family Calls. It Doesn't Have To.
The Hidden Cost of Keeping Families in the Loop
If you run a home care agency, you already know the calls. They come in throughout the day, from families who love their loved ones and just want to know they're okay.
Who's coming today?
How did the shift go?
Can someone call me back — I have a question?
These aren't complaints. They're not red flags. They're just families doing what families do — trying to stay connected to someone they care deeply about, from a distance, without a reliable way to get information.
But for your office team, those calls add up. In agencies serving private-pay clients, office staff can spend anywhere from three to five hours per day fielding family communication. That's half a full-time employee — every single day — spent on calls that are almost entirely routine.
Why This Keeps Happening
The problem isn't that families call too much. The problem is that they have no other way to get the information they need.
Home care agencies have invested heavily in the tools that matter for compliance and clinical operations — electronic visit verification, care plan documentation, scheduling software. These tools do exactly what they're designed to do. But they weren't built with the family in mind.
Families don't have access to the schedule. They can't see when a shift started or ended. They have no way to know how the visit went unless someone calls them — or they call the office first.
So they call. Every day. Sometimes multiple times.
And your team answers, because that's what high-touch home care looks like. That's the standard you've set. But the cumulative cost of that standard — in staff time, in interruptions, in delayed responses to other priorities — is significant.
What High-Touch Really Means
Here's the reframe worth considering: high-touch doesn't have to mean high-volume phone calls.
The families calling your office aren't necessarily looking for a conversation. Most of the time, they're looking for a quick answer to a simple question. Who's coming today. Whether the shift happened. Whether mom seemed okay.
If they had a way to get that information without picking up the phone, many of them would. Not because they don't value the relationship with your team — but because waiting for a callback is stressful, and they'd rather know now.
The agencies that are starting to solve this problem aren't replacing the human relationship. They're creating a parallel channel — one that handles the routine, so the phone is reserved for what actually requires a conversation.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In a current pilot with a private-pay home care agency in the Northeast, office staff were spending an estimated three to five hours per day on family calls — a figure that's consistent with what we hear across the industry.
The pilot introduced a simple coordination layer between the agency, families, and caregivers — giving families access to the information they needed most, when they needed it, without requiring a phone call.
Early results are still being tracked, but the directional signal is clear: when families have a reliable way to stay informed, routine call volume drops. And when they do call, it's because something actually warrants a conversation.
The Opportunity for Your Agency
For agency owners and operations directors, the math is straightforward. Three to five hours of staff time per day — across a year — is a meaningful operational cost. More importantly, it's time that could be redirected toward the work that actually differentiates your agency: clinical oversight, caregiver support, family relationships that go beyond the routine.
For families considering home care for a loved one, this is worth asking about. Does the agency you're evaluating have a way to keep you informed between calls? Can you see the schedule? Will you know how the shift went without having to chase someone down?
The best home care agencies are starting to answer yes.
Interested in Learning More?
If you're a home care agency exploring ways to reduce routine family call volume without compromising the quality of your client relationships, we'd love to talk.
If you're ready to explore a pilot for your agency, you can request one directly.
Feature photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels