Miriam Allred (00:10)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the lab. It's Miriam Allred, your host. Great to be here. Hope everyone's having an awesome week. Today in the lab, I am joined by Dave Dworschak, the head of growth at Phoebe. Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Dworschak (Phoebe) (00:22)
Yeah, hey, Miriam, thanks for having me.
Miriam Allred (00:25)
Let's get right into it. You and I have been catching up before we jump on, but I say this a lot, but a new face kind of new name in the industry, yourself and Phoebe. So let's start with an introduction. Do want to talk about your background and tell kind of your personal story?
Dave Dworschak (Phoebe) (00:39)
Yeah, sure. So I have been, you know, I'm so I'm Dave. Nice to meet everybody. I've been in and around kind of health care in some capacity more or less my whole career.
Right out of college, which I don't have a technical or healthcare background, transparently, but right out of college, I helped start a company that was in the early days of electronic medical records for acute care hospitals and providers. So we basically helped people migrate off a paper into EHRs for the first time. I actually thought that would be like a fun little project at a college, maybe six months, a year, something like that. And ended up sticking around and helping grow that business from the first employee in 2010 or
about seven years later, were roughly 200 people moving hospitals and moving data for hospitals in various capacities all across the country. Really interesting experience there. It was more of a services business, but I did have the chance to build a basically BPO offshore in the Philippines through that. So traveled back and forth and got to do kind of the onshore offshore healthcare operating model, which was very fun. And then I left that in 2000 and let's see, 18.
and I started my first software company. Transparently did not know a lot about technology at the time going into that, but had a couple of ideas with a good friend of mine who was a traveling nurse and ⁓ just dove right in to figure out how to do a startup. And we ended up over the course of around five years building a platform for traveling healthcare workers that are kind of moving around from hospital to hospital, helped build a centralized digital wall or a clearing house, so to say, of their credentials.
and paperwork so they're not having to get re-credentialed every time they move from job to job every few months. And then on the employment side we had a product for staffing companies to both manage compliance as well as like self-serve or provide the healthcare workers a self-serve mechanism for getting through like the job search recruitment compliance etc. So over the course of that like five-year run we
I had several hundred thousand users, several hundred companies on the like staffing company side of the fence using the product and eventually sold into a private equity backed very large traveling nurse staffing firm. And at the end of the day, moved merged my team of about 60 people into their team of 500 or so and had quite an interesting experience working both on the early stage startup is as well as the, what it looks like to merge in with a very large enterprise org doing, most
one of the highest gross staffing ⁓ operations on the healthcare side in the country.
Miriam Allred (03:15)
Very cool, very interesting. A wide array, but mostly healthcare based, which is neat. And there's a lot of crossover. Obviously healthcare is vast and there's a lot of different facets, but relevant to home care and leading to where you are. You're based in Orlando. Are you a Floridian or where are you from originally?
Dave Dworschak (Phoebe) (03:32)
Yeah, I'm in North Florida, actually in Jacksonville, so close, but I grew up in Florida. I was here most of my life. Maybe not super interesting for everybody, but I moved out of Florida 10, 11 years ago. For the last 10 or 11 years, I lived in several places, Louisiana, Colorado, several stents overseas.
have a couple of young kids and as tends to happen, moved back closer to family a couple years ago from Colorado into Jacksonville. So I'm here in Florida and then I know we'll talk a little bit about Phoebe today as well, the company that I'm working on, but ⁓ I'm here in Florida, but most of our team and company is based out of New York.
Miriam Allred (04:14)
So Phoebe, kind of a newer name in the industry, but popping up more and more everywhere. And I've just gotten acquainted with you over the last several months and have been really impressed with you and the team. so talk a little bit about Phoebe, overview, who you guys are, what you're up to, what you're building, what problems you're solving, just kind of like high level overview. then we're going to talk more in depth today about AI and about the problems that you guys are already quite literally solving.
Dave Dworschak (Phoebe) (04:40)
Yeah, sure. you know, at a high level, like Phoebe, we build AI teammates for home care and home health businesses. We've been working on this since really late 2024. Justin, our founder and CEO, was also kind of a second time founder, has built and sold software companies in the past. And, him and I met and he was working on a thesis in this space and we spent a good amount of time, we'll say,
ideating and talking to people and talking to healthcare workers and caregivers and folks all across the market, not just on the home care home health side, but also in SNFs and other assisted living type facilities and post acute space. And we really zeroed in on the idea for Phoebe when we met the home care scheduler who
And really, even before that, had tons of workers we were chatting with on some of our early products, caregivers, healthcare workers, and they were always saying, my job of keeping myself scheduled is pretty difficult, but you should go talk to the people that are scheduling me. And ultimately ended up landing on what we do today, which is building AI scheduling assistance for home care and home health businesses, and have had that up and running now for a little more than six months.
Miriam Allred (05:54)
Amazing. you say, yeah, AI assistance. we're talking about the role of the scheduler. The scheduler has primary functions and maybe secondary functions. both know every home care business, like a snowflake runs and operates a little bit differently. go one layer deeper, some of just high-level tasks of the scheduler that you guys are specifically plugging into today.
Dave Dworschak (Phoebe) (06:16)
Yeah, totally. As great software companies should do, we talk to people who are doing the scheduling work every day and that's how we decide what we're going to build and what we're going to help with first. And the core activities we're focused on today are number one, the scheduling outreach where you've got new clients or you have caregivers going on vacation or you've got call outs, which is actually kind of the first problem we started to tackle. And the scheduler needs to reach out to 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 caregivers in order to try to get a shift filled. Phoebe helps with that by going
into the EHR scheduling platform of the home care business and extracting all the information, you know, the scheduler would typically be reading in order to have a conversation with the caregiver via phone via text about a shift or case opportunity that's open. And then rather than the scheduler picking up the phone and say calling 15 people back to back over the course of 45 minutes, Phoebe's voice and SMS texting AI assistant can simultaneously reach out to the caregivers and have conversations all at once. So that's kind of the first thing
we launched and also the thing that's most exciting for folks, especially because schedulers spend so much time making calls and sending text messages that don't lead to people taking shifts. So you've got Phoebe, this AI assistant that's really being directed by you as a scheduler that is going out and doing all the dirty work for you and then bringing you back to people who are interested and qualified and ready to talk. So that's the kind of core thing. And then we've got a few other activities in and around scheduling and schedule coordination where we're doing
day before shift confirmations automatically and getting explicit confirmation from caregivers about their shifts that they're going to be at their shift or shifts for the following day. It's very flexible the way we set that up for clients. Phoebe persistently follows up, follows kind of the tone approach culture that the agency would typically take to communicate with their staff. So learns from that and then executes in the same fashion that the scheduler or coordinator would. And then on the backside of shifts, we are also monitoring for miss clock ins and clock outs.
So faster than a scheduler would typically even learn that somebody has missed their clock in or clock out. Phoebe has already texted the caregiver, called the caregiver, had a conversation with them, tried to troubleshoot, figure out what's going on. Hopefully just get them to clock in or out. But otherwise escalates it up to the scheduling team on those edge cases that the AI can't quite handle.
