For home care agencies
Home care scheduling built on visits, not shifts
Home care scheduling software plans caregiver visits to clients at their homes, rather than shifts on a unit. It accounts for travel time between consecutive visits, preserves caregiver–client continuity, respects client exclusions, and captures mileage, none of which a facility shift scheduler has any concept of.
From $99/month per location · No sales call · No card to start
At a glance
- Home care scheduling is visit-based, not shift-based: a client, an address, a duration and a task list, not a block on a unit.
- Travel time between consecutive visits is a scheduling constraint. Two visits eleven miles apart with fifteen minutes between them is not a schedule.
- Caregiver–client continuity is a product feature, not a nicety. Clients and their families notice a stranger, and they call about it.
- Client records are the one part of MedAligna that constitutes protected health information, and every read is logged, not merely every change.
- Included on Pro at $149 per location per month, with a 14-day trial.
How is visit scheduling different from shift scheduling?
A visit is not a shift, and pretending otherwise breaks the day. Most tools sold to home care agencies are facility schedulers with the word 'client' pasted over 'unit'; the difference shows up by the second visit of the morning.
A caregiver's day is a route, not a block. MedAligna schedules visits (a client, an address, a duration, a set of tasks) and checks travel time between consecutive visits before it lets you book them. Two visits eleven miles apart with fifteen minutes between them is not a schedule; it is an apology waiting to happen, and the caregiver is the one who has to make it.
Recurring visit patterns generate the week, and each visit carries its own task list. Mileage is captured at completion, so it feeds the same export as the hours.
How is caregiver continuity maintained?
Continuity is the product. Mrs Chen does not want a stranger in her house, and neither does her daughter, who is the one who will call you about it.
MedAligna treats caregiver–client continuity as a first-class preference: the engine prefers the person who has been before, and shows you when it cannot. Client exclusions are absolute: a caregiver who should never return to a particular client is not offered that visit, and there is no way to do it accidentally.
The same rules that protect a hospital floor protect a living room: credentials checked before assignment, rest between visits, and the caregiver's own contracted hours respected rather than quietly exceeded.
How do scheduled visits become hours you can export?
The part where the schedule meets the payroll. Home care lives and dies on the gap between what was scheduled and what actually happened.
Caregivers clock in and out from the visit itself, with optional geofencing, and missed visits alert immediately rather than surfacing on an invoice. Timesheets are built from scheduled-versus-actual with the variance flagged, and hours export as a timesheet CSV your payroll system imports.
A caregiver's credentials live in a wallet she owns. She uploads a renewal once and every agency she works for sees it, which is the difference between onboarding a per-diem caregiver in an afternoon and losing her to the agency that could.
What does a morning on the road actually look like?
The impossible morning
Three visits booked back to back across a county. On paper the day works. In the car it does not, and the caregiver is the one apologising to the third client.
Travel time between consecutive visits is checked before the booking is allowed. The schedule that gets published is one that can actually be driven.
The stranger in the house
Mrs Chen has had four different caregivers this month. Her daughter has now called the agency twice.
Continuity is a scoring preference: the engine prefers the caregiver who has been before, and tells you when it cannot. Client exclusions are absolute.
The visit that did not happen
A caregiver misses a visit. Nobody finds out until the client's family calls, or worse, until the invoice is queried a month later.
Clock-in from the visit, with optional geofencing, and a missed-visit alert the moment it is late rather than the moment it is billed.
How to choose home care scheduling software
Eight questions worth asking any vendor in this category, including us. At least one of them is a question we do not answer well, and we have said so rather than leaving it out.
01Is it visit-based or a facility scheduler with 'client' pasted over 'unit'?
Most tools sold to home care agencies are shift schedulers with the labels changed. The difference shows up by the second visit of the morning, when the day cannot be driven.
Where MedAligna lands: Visits are first-class: client, address, duration, task list. Travel time between consecutive visits is checked before a booking is allowed.
02Does it check travel time?
It is the single constraint that makes home care different from facility scheduling, and it is the one most tools ignore entirely.
Where MedAligna lands: Yes, between consecutive visits, using the distance between client addresses.
03Can it enforce a client exclusion absolutely?
'This caregiver must never return to this client' is not a preference. It must be impossible to do by accident.
Where MedAligna lands: Absolute. An excluded caregiver is never offered that visit, and there is no path to assigning her to it by mistake.
04How is client information protected?
A client's name and address tied to receipt of care is protected health information. Ask any vendor precisely what they do about it, and be suspicious of a confident one-word answer.
Where MedAligna lands: Tenant-isolated at the database level, encrypted, and every read of a client record is logged separately from every change. If you are evaluating us for home care, talk to us and we will walk you through it in detail.
05Does it do EVV?
Medicaid-funded personal care requires Electronic Visit Verification through a state aggregator. If your funding requires it, this is a gating question and nothing else matters until it is answered.
Where MedAligna lands: We capture clock-in and clock-out at the visit with optional geofencing, but we do not integrate with state EVV aggregators today. If your Medicaid funding requires EVV submission, we are not a complete answer for you yet, and you should know that before you trial us.
06Does it capture mileage?
It is a reimbursable cost and a real component of caregiver pay, and reconstructing it from memory at month end is nobody's idea of a good time.
Where MedAligna lands: Captured at visit completion and exported alongside hours.
What is EVV, a client exclusion, or travel time?
- Visit
- A scheduled attendance at a client's home: an address, a start time, a duration and a set of tasks. The unit of work in home care, as distinct from a shift on a unit.
- Travel time
- The driving time between consecutive visits. A scheduling constraint, not an afterthought: a rota that ignores it is a rota that cannot be driven.
- Continuity
- Sending the same caregiver back to the same client. Valued intensely by clients and families, and modelled as a scoring preference rather than a hard rule, because sometimes it simply is not possible.
- Client exclusion
- A hard rule that a particular caregiver must never be assigned to a particular client. Unlike continuity, this is absolute.
- EVV
- Electronic Visit Verification. Required for Medicaid-funded personal care, submitted through a state aggregator, verifying that a visit took place, when, where and by whom.
- PHI
- Protected health information. A client's name and address, held alongside the fact that they receive care, qualifies, which makes home care the one part of a scheduling product that touches HIPAA directly.
Questions people actually ask
- What does home care scheduling software cost?
- MedAligna is $149 per month per location: visit scheduling, travel time, continuity and client records sit on the Pro tier, along with time and attendance and payroll export. Starter at $99 is a facility roster and does not include visits, so for an agency scheduling visits Pro is the honest number. Enterprise is $249 for unlimited caregivers and an API. Three or more branches get 20% off; the trial is 14 days and takes no card.
- Who sets it up, and how do caregivers get on it?
- The scheduler sets it up in an afternoon: import the caregivers from a CSV, add the clients and their addresses, build the recurring visit patterns, and publish. Caregivers are invited to the app and clock in from the visit itself; there is nothing for them to buy and nothing for you to install. No sales call stands in front of the trial, and a caregiver's credentials come with her: she uploads a renewal once and every agency she works for sees it.
- Is this visit-based scheduling or shift-based?
- Visit-based. A visit has a client, an address, a duration and a task list, and MedAligna checks travel time between consecutive visits before letting you book them. Facility shift scheduling is also supported for agencies that run live-in or facility-style staffing.
- Does it work for home health as well as home care?
- Yes. Home health scheduling adds skilled clinicians (nurses and therapists making Medicare-certified visits) to the same visit model, and that is where credential blocking earns its keep: an RN whose licence lapses cannot be booked to Thursday's visits. The scheduling mechanics (travel time, continuity, exclusions, mileage) are identical for both.
- Does it handle caregiver–client continuity?
- Yes. Continuity is a scoring preference (the engine prefers the caregiver who has been before), and client exclusions are absolute, so a caregiver who should never return to a client cannot be assigned there by accident.
- Does it do EVV?
- Caregivers clock in and out from the visit with optional geofencing, and a visit with no clock-in is visible on the schedule immediately. Direct integration with state EVV aggregators is not something we do today; tell us your state and we will tell you exactly where that leaves you.
- How is client information protected?
- Client records are the one part of MedAligna that holds protected health information, and they are treated accordingly: tenant-isolated at the database level, encrypted, and every read of a client record is logged separately, not just every change. If you are evaluating MedAligna for home care, talk to us and we will walk you through exactly how it is handled.
Related
Schedule the route, not the room
Travel time, continuity, exclusions and mileage, from a tool that knows a visit is not a shift.