AI scheduling primary care and mental health to drive 90% efficiency

• 90%

  Reduction in manual labor

  Less time spent on scheduling each week

• +26%

  Care Team satisfaction

  Higher satisfaction, fewer last-minute call-outs

Results at a glance

• 90% less scheduling time across all operating units
• +26% Care Team satisfaction, with fewer last-minute call-outs and better retention
• 100% of Care Team preferences considered in every published schedule
• ~75% less weekly workflow time across pre-schedule planning, scheduling, and post-schedule management
• New lines of business opened by an upleveled operations team — with no added headcount

About Dialogue

Dialogue delivers virtual and in-person primary care and mental health services across 13 regions and medical groups — the leading hybrid care model in Canada. Behind it is a clinical Care Team of 580 full-time and 310 part-time members, supported by a 290-person staff and an operations team of industry veterans who run care delivery at the top of their game.

The pain

Hybrid care at this scale means scheduling full-time, part-time, flexible contractor, and external agency Care Team members — each with the healthcare-specific skills, licenses, and credentials that determine who can see which patients, where.

Tools that can't model a flexible workforce. Rigid scheduling software couldn't represent the full-time / part-time / contractor / agency mix or the credentials behind it, so the gaps were closed with spreadsheets and manual work.

Manual madness from spreadsheets. Planning, building, and fixing schedules by hand consumed the week — roughly 54 hours of pre-schedule planning, 135 hours of scheduling, and 109 hours of post-schedule management.

Margin eroding as it scaled. Every new region added more manual hours, so the cost of running care grew in lockstep with the business — exactly backwards.

~54h planning + ~135h scheduling + ~109h post-schedule = nearly 300 hours of manual work, every single week — effort that scaled with growth instead of shrinking.

The challenge

Dialogue's operations team is among the best in Canadian healthcare — and it was spending its time fighting spreadsheets instead of growing the business. To protect margin and open new programs without simply adding headcount, the manual scheduling work had to come out of the system entirely.

The solution

Dialogue's CTO and VP of Operations partnered with us to automate scheduling and streamline workflows across every unit. Our AI now builds schedules end-to-end: budgets and forecasts confirmed up front, auto-scheduling that accounts for skills, licenses, credentials, and 100% of Care Team preferences, and real-time coverage and risk visibility after publish.

Considering every Care Team member's preferences isn't a nice-to-have: it lifted retention, cut last-minute call-outs, and drove a 26% increase in Care Team satisfaction.

Change management: embedded and on-site

Software doesn't transform operations — adoption does. We embedded directly with Dialogue's teams, flew on-site, and worked alongside operations through every stage of the rollout to make sure the transition went smoothly for an organization that doesn't compromise on care delivery. Everything was built around trust: earning it unit by unit, with the people who actually run the schedules, before expanding to the next.

The impact

With nearly 300 weekly hours of manual scheduling cut by ~75%, Dialogue's 33-person operations team — which had 5 open hires planned — was upleveled instead of expanded. Freed from spreadsheet maintenance, the team plans capacity strategically and opens new lines of business on top of Untether.

Scheduling that once consumed operations now takes a tenth of the time, Care Teams are more satisfied and stay longer, and the cost of delivering care falls instead of rising as Dialogue grows.

What's next

Dialogue is building new programs on the operating capacity it just reclaimed — turning workforce automation into a growth engine rather than a back-office expense.