The Home Health Scheduler / Intake Coordinator plays a dual, critical role in managing the patient lifecycle and optimizing field staff efficiency. This position is responsible for directing the end-to-end patient intake process—including referral management, insurance verification, and authorization—while seamlessly transitioning patients to home care. Additionally, the coordinator manages the daily computerized scheduling system, mapping out field staff itineraries, ensuring continuity of care, and maintaining clear communication between patients, families, clinicians, and referral sources.
Essential Job Functions & Responsibilities
1. Intake & Referral Management
Operations & Oversight: Direct daily patient referral and intake operations, ensuring the consistent implementation of established intake policies.
Regulatory Compliance: Maintain strict compliance with all state, federal, and Joint Commission referral and intake regulatory requirements.
Insurance Verification & Authorization: Oversee the insurance verification and authorization process to ensure maximum third-party reimbursement.
Pricing Negotiation: Negotiate service pricing with insurance case managers and other payers within established financial and credit parameters.
Contract Management: Maintain a comprehensive working knowledge of Archer Health contractual relationships to ensure patients are admitted according to contract provisions.
Data Tracking: Gather, collate, and report weekly/monthly referral statistics and key customer referral trends to the leadership team.
2. Scheduling & Staff Optimization
Capacity Forecasting: Maintain a documented daily and two-week advance forecast of nurse and clinician availability, territories, and workloads.
Schedule Maintenance: Update and maintain computerized scheduling calendars in real time throughout the day within the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.
Care Milestones: Coordinate and schedule the initial Start of Care (SOC) visits, Resumption of Care (ROC) visits, and follow-up milestones (e.g., Face-to-Face encounters, CMS 485).
Staff Utilization: Optimize field staff placement by evaluating clinician location, patient needs, and current caseloads to ensure consistent, timely patient care.
Coverage Coordination: Efficiently reassign and coordinate uncovered visits resulting from clinician illness, time off, or over-allocation.
Specialty & Vendor Coordination:
Collaborate with the Palliative Care Director/Clinical Manager to assign palliative-trained staff to designated patients.
Coordinate with outside contracted therapy companies to align and document scheduled durations for PT, OT, and ST visits.
3. Care Coordination & Patient Tracking
Transition of Care: Ensure a seamless transition to home care by coordinating patient education, plan of care initiation, and clinical service provider assignments.
EMR Data Integrity: Keep patient EMRs updated with real-time information regarding hospitalizations, ER visits, community organization involvement (e.g., Adult Day Care), missed visits, transfers, and re-certifications.
Admission Tracking: Confirm and verify inpatient admissions; maintain communication with patients and families during hospitalizations directly or via discharge planners and case managers.
Logistics & Order Tracking: Track Durable Medical Equipment (DME) delivery confirmation and maintain an ongoing IT database for physician orders to promote team awareness.
4. Communication & Relationship Management
Customer Service: Act as a primary point of contact, answering incoming calls from clinicians, patients, and families in a courteous, professional manner.
Relationship Building: Build and maintain positive working relationships with current and potential referral sources, building Archer Health’s reputation as a high-quality provider.
Leadership Reporting: Promptly communicate additional staffing needs, field challenges, or operational trends to the leadership team; perform other duties as assigned.
Position Qualifications
Education: High School Diploma or GED required; some college coursework in a health-related field or Medical Assistant (MA) certification is highly preferred.
Experience: 2–3 years of experience in a healthcare scheduling or intake role with a strong familiarity with basic medical terminology.
Technical Skills: Proficient in MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook) and comfortable navigating computerized scheduling/EMR databases.
Communication Skills: Demonstrated strength in customer service, public relations, negotiation, and interdepartmental communication.
Core Competencies: High level of autonomy, organization, assertiveness, and flexibility. Strong critical thinking skills are required to solve complex scheduling conflicts and manage diverse affiliates.
Continuing Education Requirements
Personnel are expected to participate in appropriate continuing education programs as requested by leadership to enhance job-related skills. Attendance at all mandatory agency educational initiatives and compliance trainings is required.
