Nashville-based health tech startup UnityAI built an agentic AI platform to streamline day-to-day staff scheduling and match it in real time with patient demand.
The healthcare staffing and labor management platform, called StaffOps, is already live in about 120 sites of care, supporting workforce scheduling across a growing network of clinical organizations. The startup's AI agent connects workforce scheduling with electronic health record data to reduce cancellations, improve throughput and optimize labor utilization, executives said.
The platform enables healthcare teams to adjust staffing and labor based on live appointment data, cancellations and overall patient flow, according to the company.
UnityAI first developed specialized agents to help staff with patient scheduling, appointment confirmation, intake and follow-up. Its voice AI technology was designed to support healthcare staff in outpatient clinics to answer incoming calls and proactively engage with patients.
The startup, founded in 2023, is strategically focused on healthcare operations, noted Edmund Jackson, co-founder and CEO.
"What we're trying to do is create excellent schedules, that's our North Star. Our belief is that what providers bring to the market is time for a patient in a place with a clinician, and, if you get that right, everything else happens," Jackson said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare, giving a first look at the StaffOps platform. "The first evolution so far has been using agents on the supply side of that, getting patients on the schedule where they should be. But that's only half the problem. The other half is the clinicians. How do you do staffing? So not just clinicians, but clinical techs, other staff members. How do you get them in the right place at the right time to meet the patient demand? How do you match it?"
Jackson asserted that patient access and patient experience need to be matched with staffing operations, not addressed as separate functions.
Currently, most providers staff their healthcare workforce based on a fixed schedule with static shifts that are planned in advance, but that doesn't keep pace with the realities of patient demand, which changes by the day, and even the hour. Providers frequently deal with cancellations and mismatched staffing, with overworked clinicians in some areas and underutilized capacity in others.
UnityAI's StaffOps integrates directly with the EHR and human resources systems, giving managers a real-time view of patient appointments, including cancellations and reschedules. Organizations can align staffing levels to actual patient demand rather than static schedules. By continuously syncing workforce supply with patient volume, StaffOps enables a more dynamic staffing model that improves patient throughput while reducing unnecessary labor spend, executives said.
"The platform figures out who are the roster of staff, what are their credentials, where can they work? Where can't they work? What are their preferences for language? What's their experience? What patients are coming in, when and where? It'll optimize a schedule and say, this is the mathematical optimal given these constraints," Jackson said. "Clinic providers can manage all the exceptions to that, move patients around, deal with PTOs, call-on, call-off shift trades. What's really important is that it has a broad view, as most of our clients are multi-site, so we're not just managing one clinic."
StaffOps provides a unified, self-service platform for both frontline staff and site leaders. For healthcare practitioners, the platform simplifies day-to-day scheduling. Clinicians and staff can request shifts, release shifts they cannot work and submit PTO requests through a single interface, eliminating the back-and-forth that often slows down staffing coordination. For staffing managers and site leaders, the StaffOps platform is designed to improve visibility and responsiveness, executives said, making it faster to identify and fill coverage gaps caused by PTO or last-minute call-offs, thereby reducing patient appointment cancellations and maintaining continuity of care.
UnityAI's work to apply agentic AI to healthcare workforce operations marks a broader shift where AI isn’t just helping with documentation or analytics, but is also starting to coordinate actual work inside provider organizations, Jackson noted.
The vision, Jackson said, is to expand AI agents beyond scheduling into labor optimization and autonomous workforce operations for all staff in a clinic. The AI agents will be able to handle both sides of the operation—supply and demand.
"That operation consumes so much mental bandwidth and time and energy, so lifting that friction from [site managers] creates time in their day to take care of the patients that are actually in the clinic," he said.
The company is developing AI agents that can manage routine staffing decisions in real time via voice and SMS text, including processing call-offs, coordinating shift swaps, approving PTO requests and adjusting coverage based on patient demand. The aim is to coordinate patient appointment adjustments, helping organizations proactively manage access changes rather than reacting after the fact, according to the company.
UnityAI was formed by three former HCA Healthcare engineers and data scientist executives, including Jackson who served as chief data scientist and chief data officer at the health system. UnityAI initially focused on scaling up its care orchestration technology to improve patient flow in a hospital setting. The startup shifted its focus to multi-site outpatient providers and works with radiology, dental, behavioral, substance abuse, primary care and other providers.
"We decided we needed to move faster, to find clients where we could apply AI for operations at a higher metabolic rate. What we found was that these multi-site outpatient providers are very well organized, they're looking to move faster and they care about operations very, very deeply," Jackson said.
UnityAI raised $8.5 million in a series A round back in March to fuel its work to develop an autonomous AI workforce across all healthcare operations.