The phone rang at 10:14 a.m. A wife, her voice tight with worry, needed an appointment for her husband that day.
I pulled up the schedule. Fully booked. I could hear the hope draining from her voice as I explained we had no openings.
I grabbed a sticky note and wrote down her number anyway.
Three hours later, a cancellation. I remembered the note, called her back, and got them in that afternoon. She was so grateful. Thanked me for remembering them. Said it meant everything.
It felt good. Like I’d really helped someone.
But here’s the thing—that wasn’t the system working. That was me, manually tracking something in my head and on a piece of paper, hoping I’d remember to check back if something opened up. One person’s vigilance covering for a system gap.
That same day: a patient showed up on the wrong day and got angry at me. Another tried to manipulate the schedule by claiming they’d been told something they hadn’t. An unwarranted complaint came through that I’d spend the next week defending myself against.
And I realized something. The smile moments only happened because of unsustainable heroics. And the frown moments came with the territory no matter what I did.
The Human in the Middle
If you’ve ever done scheduling or coordination work in healthcare, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
You’re not just managing schedules. You’re the human buffer between:
- System limitations and people’s urgent needs
- What you can actually do and what people demand
- Genuine emergencies and manipulation attempts
- Doing everything right and getting blamed anyway
At the VA, I carried that weight every day. The manual tracking. The mental load of remembering who needed what. The phone calls. The complaints. The people lying to get their way. The ones genuinely desperate. Sorting between the two while keeping everything moving.
Your Coordinators Feel This Even More Intensely
Home care coordinators live in this exact space—but with fewer resources and higher stakes.
They’re juggling:
- Last-minute caregiver call-offs while families demand immediate replacements
- Schedule changes that cascade through multiple families and caregivers
- Coverage gaps they patch with heroic phone trees at 9 p.m. on a Saturday
- Families who manipulate: “If you don’t send someone today, we’re switching agencies”
- Caregivers who cancel: legitimate emergencies mixed with reliability issues
- Being blamed when the match isn’t perfect or timing doesn’t work
And just like I did at the VA, they’re manually tracking things that should be automated:
- Writing down who needs coverage
- Remembering to call when availability opens up
- Checking back on requests they couldn’t fulfill
- Maintaining relationships while absorbing everyone’s frustration
The Real Cost of Manual Heroics
Your best coordinators don’t leave because they don’t care.
They leave because caring isn’t enough when they’re manually holding everything together.
They burn out not from hard work—but from unsustainable heroics. From being the only thing standing between scheduling chaos and complete breakdown. From absorbing emotional weight that compounds every single day.
And when they leave? They take all that manual knowledge with them. The sticky notes. The mental maps. The relationships. The institutional memory of which caregiver works best with which client.
What Actually Protects Your People
You don’t need another scheduling tool that just digitizes the chaos.
You need to reduce the weight on the human in the middle.
Intelligent systems that:
- Track urgent requests automatically (no more sticky notes and hoping you remember)
- Match availability to needs proactively (no more heroic phone trees at night)
- Create transparency that reduces manipulation (“Here’s what’s actually available, here’s the wait”)
- Document everything (no more he-said-she-said)
- Surface patterns that help you make better decisions (which matches work, which don’t)
- Give back strategic capacity instead of demanding more manual effort
This isn’t about replacing the human touch. It’s about removing the unsustainable burden so your coordinators can focus on what actually matters: relationships, judgment, care quality, problem-solving.
The Sticky Note Problem
That sticky note I wrote at the VA? I saved someone’s day because I manually remembered.
But I also spent hundreds of hours manually tracking things that intelligent systems should have handled. Hours I could have spent on strategic work. On improving processes. On being there for the people who needed complex problem-solving, not basic tracking.
Your coordinators are living the sticky note problem right now. Writing things down. Hoping they remember. Being heroic. Getting exhausted.
The question isn’t whether they care enough.
The question is: how long can they sustain heroics before they burn out?
A Different Approach
After my years working at the VA watching dedicated people carry weight they shouldn’t have to carry, I started Neurvana with one clear mission:
Reduce the burden on the people doing the real work of care.
Not by removing humans from the equation—by removing the manual heroics that wear them down.
Because the smile moments? They should come from making a difference, not from pulling off miracles despite the system.
And the frown moments? Many of them disappear when you have intelligent systems handling the tracking, the matching, the documentation, and the proactive problem-solving.
Your coordinators got into this work to help people. Let’s build systems that let them keep doing exactly that, just without burning themselves out in the process.