By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
Peoria, Illinois home health and senior care agencies miss referral calls every week. How a 24/7 AI phone agent answers, books visits, and alerts on-call staff.
Key takeaways
Home health and senior care agencies in Peoria, Illinois lose referrals, private-duty clients, and family trust every time a call rings through to voicemail. An AI voice and chat agent answers every call around the clock, captures referral and insurance details, books assessments, and texts urgent concerns to your on-call nurse. For an aging river city where the Caterpillar retiree generation is now the client base, that is the difference between growing a census and watching it stall.
Picture Tuesday, 7 p.m. A daughter in Dunlap has just left her father's house on the West Bluff. He worked more than three decades in East Peoria and retired with a good pension, but tonight he couldn't get up the stairs without stopping twice, and she is finally ready to call about in-home care. She dials the first agency on her list. Voicemail. She does not leave a message — she calls the second agency on the list. Whoever answers gets the client, and in Peoria's crowded senior care market, that is usually how the decision is made.
They put an AI voice agent on the phone line so every call is answered live, 24 hours a day. The agent captures referral details from hospital discharge planners, walks adult children through services and next steps, books in-home assessments, and sends urgent clinical concerns straight to the on-call nurse by text — no hold queue, no voicemail, no lost census.
Peoria's demographics were shaped by one employer more than any other. Caterpillar's factories and offices anchored the local economy for a century, and the workers who built that era are now in their seventies and eighties. Many of them stayed — in the older homes along Moss Avenue and the West Bluff, in Peoria Heights, out in Germantown Hills and Metamora — in houses with basements, steep drives, and staircases that get harder every winter. When ice coats the bluffs above the Illinois River from December through February, falls spike, hospital discharges spike, and so do calls to every home health and senior care office in the 309.
The referral side is just as relentless. Discharge planners and case managers at OSF HealthCare Saint Francis Medical Center and the Carle Health hospitals work through lists of agencies when a patient needs home health after a hip replacement or a cardiac event. They are moving fast, they have families waiting, and they do not chase agencies that don't pick up. A ringing, unanswered line at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday reads as an agency that can't take the case.
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These calls decide your census. They come in clusters — late morning after rounds, and late afternoon as planners try to clear discharges before the weekend. If your intake coordinator is on the other line or out doing a supervisory visit, the referral moves down the list. One missed referral call can quietly cost an entire episode of care.
Families research senior care after work, which means your best marketing leads call between 6 and 9 p.m., when the office is dark. These callers are anxious, often guilty, and comparison shopping. The agency that answers, explains services calmly, and books an assessment on the spot almost always wins the client.
Private-duty and senior care runs on shift coverage. When a caregiver calls off before dawn, someone has to catch that call and start the scramble, or a client on the East Bluff sits alone waiting for help that isn't coming. Missed call-offs become missed shifts, and missed shifts become cancelled contracts.
An AI voice and chat agent from CallSphere sits in front of your existing phone number and answers instantly, every time, with no limit on how many callers it can handle at once. It is configured around your services, coverage area, and payer mix, and it knows the difference between a routine question and an emergency.
Handling is HIPAA-aligned across intake, scheduling, and reminders. The agent never gives clinical advice — anything clinical is routed to your nurses, which is exactly where surveyors want it to go.
flowchart TD
A["Call rings: family, referral, or caregiver"] --> B{"Office able to answer?"}
B -->|"Line busy or after hours"| C["AI agent answers on the first ring"]
C --> D{"What does the caller need?"}
D -->|"New referral"| E["Capture patient, payer, and start-of-care details"]
D -->|"Family inquiry"| F["Explain services, book in-home assessment"]
D -->|"Caregiver call-off"| G["Log shift gap, text scheduler now"]
D -->|"Urgent concern (fall, symptom change)"| H["Text on-call nurse with callback number"]
E --> I["Structured summary to intake coordinator"]
F --> IBe conservative. A single Medicare home health episode is commonly worth a few thousand dollars in revenue to an agency. A private-duty senior care client at 20 hours a week generates several thousand dollars a month and often stays for a year or more. If answering every call recovers even one referral or one private-duty client per month — a low bar for any agency currently sending evening callers to voicemail — the service pays for itself many times over.
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The cost side is small and transparent: a Lite plan at $50 per month covers a Q&A voice agent plus website chatbot, full plans with booking and workflows start at $149 per month, and usage is billed at cost, about $0.015 per inbound minute with no markup. Details are on the pricing page. Compare that to a live answering service that charges per call and still just takes messages.
Yes — CallSphere handles intake, scheduling, and reminders in a HIPAA-aligned way, and it never provides clinical advice; clinical questions are routed to your nursing staff. We do not claim certifications we don't hold, and we will walk your compliance officer through exactly how call data is handled.
Yes, within the rules you set. Most agencies have it share hourly ranges or explain how Medicare home health differs from private pay, then book an assessment where your team quotes precisely. You control what it says about money.
The call is answered immediately, the shift and client are logged, and your scheduler gets a text within seconds. The two hours of scramble time that recovers is often the difference between covering the shift and cancelling on a client.
Within 24 hours of setup. You keep your existing phone number; calls simply get answered instead of hitting voicemail.
No. It catches the calls she physically cannot — the second line, the lunch hour, the 7 p.m. family call — and hands her clean, structured summaries. Coordinators generally describe it as finally having a second person on the phones.
If your agency serves Peoria, Peoria Heights, East Peoria, or anywhere along the river, run the numbers on your own missed-call log, then start a free 7-day pilot — no credit card, live in a day. See how CallSphere works for healthcare businesses and stop losing clients to whoever happens to answer next.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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