Hiring 300 Nurses a Year: IntellaTriage CEO Daniel Reese on After-Hours Care & AI

About This Episode

IntellaTriage CEO Daniel Reese talks growth from 38 nurses in 2019 to about 450 today, upcoming AI initiatives, and how the moratorium is reshaping partners' strategies.

Transcript

Tom: Hey, welcome back to the Last Visit First Podcast, here live at the Homecare Homebase Users Conference in Orlando, Florida. My next guest, Daniel, the CEO of IntellaTriage. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel: Yeah, thanks for having me, Tom. Appreciate being on again.

Tom: Well, you're a sponsor here today, so tell us what's going on at the conference.

Daniel: Yeah, so this is our fourth or fifth conference here at Homecare Homebase. They always put on a great conference. It's good to see customers and meet new people. I think there's a lot of excitement in the industry right now, and a lot of AI talk. We're thinking about how we can utilize it better and how we can enable our nurses to take a load off of our customers. That seems to be the big topic of the day for most of us. There's just a lot of potential changes coming to the market, and it's both exciting and a lot of uncertainty.

Tom: So what's the buzz at IntellaTriage right now? What's going on in the business?

Daniel: Yeah, we've got a lot going on. We've been fortunate, we've continued our growth, which has been great, and now we're looking at how we can reinvest back in the business. We have some upcoming things that we'll be announcing. I'm not quite allowed to share yet, but we have some upcoming AI initiatives that really enable our nurses to document better, with higher quality, more consistently, and also provide more consistent, quality triage to the patients and families when they call in. So we're really excited about that.

Tom: Well, we'll get with your marketing team when you get ready to do that, and we'll put you on the podcast again and do an announcement through the podcast. That'll be fun. It gets out to everybody.

Daniel: I love it. That sounds great.

Tom: Anything you learned since you've been here that surprised you, or made you go, wow, I need to think about that more?

Daniel: Yeah, these conferences for me are a lot of industry things. I've had four or five conversations around the moratorium and how that's impacting partners, how they're thinking about their growth strategy, and what that's doing to their resources. It's all about being really efficient with resources right now, focusing on getting the right patients in the door and providing the right care so they can continue to do that. The focus has shifted a little bit, which has helped us as well, making sure that the services we're providing outside of just our after-hours triage, we do daytime care team coordination as well, can really unlock some levers for our customers. I think that's been big for us this year.

Tom: That's awesome. Can you imagine not being here?

Daniel: No. Homecare Homebase is still the EMR in the business, so it's always good to be exposed to the leaders at Homecare Homebase and what they're thinking about. And you get anyone who's anyone coming here, so it's always fun.

Tom: Yeah, the twentieth year. April and I were just talking about the first one of these. We did it in Fort Lauderdale, and a hurricane hit the hotel two weeks before we did the show. It was tough, but it was still the first one. And this one, it's grown so big. April and I were just reminiscing over her picture on the wall and the timeline and how cool it was. I don't work for Homecare Homebase anymore, and she's the chairman, but we're both still so involved in it, and it's pretty amazing to see how much it has grown and how big it's gotten. It's pretty wild.

Daniel: Yeah, the success story that you guys have illustrated here is pretty amazing. There's a lot of companies that don't get to celebrate twenty years, and even more who don't get to do it with so much zest. So big congratulations to you guys.

Tom: Yeah, thanks. It's been awesome. You look around this room, we're in the vendor hall here, and there's a lot of companies here that were established because they were filling a need or a niche, and they figured out how to do it really well, and Homecare Homebase partnered with them, and we're solving the problem. April's super high on the industry. The moratorium's interesting, 'cause it's gonna cause more acquisitions. I think it gets lifted over time, but it's probably gonna be extended for a while. We also spent a lot of time talking about the youngest baby boomers turning sixty-five really soon, and there's that many people behind them.

Daniel: Yes, the tailwinds are tremendous.

Tom: And now the average patient's living to be eighty years old, not seventy-seven. So we've got a problem, we've gotta solve it. We've gotta use technology, we've gotta use all the tools that you guys are building. Talk to the folks in here that don't know IntellaTriage and want to learn more about it. Tell us what you guys do.

Daniel: Yeah, IntellaTriage has been around 18 years. I don't know if that's one of the better kept secrets. We were founded back in 2008 and really focused on quality after-hours, nurse-first triage. Our guiding principle has always been getting a patient and family very quickly to a nurse, and that's helped us be successful. But we've started expanding beyond just that after-hours model. We do a lot of 24/7 now, and work a lot with daytime teams to help ease the burden on the administrative and care team staff. So we're really trying to evolve the business in different ways and think about how we can be a useful resource. We're very fortunate. The nursing shortage is very real, but we're on the flip side of it: we have lots of nurses who want remote, flexible positions and have great experience, and we want to unlock some of the workload that providers are struggling to keep up with right now.

Tom: That's awesome. All right, so you're continuing to hire.

Daniel: Always hiring a bunch of people. We'll hire probably three hundred or so nurses this year. We're up to almost four hundred and fifty nurses at this point. When I started back in 2019, we were thirty-eight nurses, so we've grown quite a bit. It's been a lot of fun.

Tom: Holy cow. Great growth. Wow, that's awesome. All right, so if people want to get a hold of you, how do they get a hold of IntellaTriage?

Daniel: Yeah, IntellaTriage.com. We have contact us forms on the webpage, that's the easy way. We go to the conference circuit, and we have salespeople who are out and about all the time. But the quickest, easiest way is IntellaTriage.com, and there's a lot of ways to get in contact with us there.

Tom: We'll put that in the show notes for you. Thank you for being here.

Daniel: Appreciate it, Tom.

Tom: All right, appreciate you. Bye.