Nashville-based health tech startup UnityAI has built an agent AI platform to streamline daily staff schedules and align with patient demand in real-time.
The healthcare staffing and labor management platform, called StaffOps, is already live in approximately 120 healthcare settings, supporting workforce scheduling across a growing network of clinical organizations. Executives say the company’s AI agents combine employee scheduling and electronic medical record data to reduce cancellations, increase throughput and optimize workforce utilization.
The company says the platform allows medical teams to adjust staffing and workforce based on actual appointment data, cancellations, and overall patient flow.
UnityAI first developed specialized agents to assist staff in scheduling, confirming appointments, seeing, and following up with patients. Its voice AI technology is designed to help medical staff in outpatient clinics answer incoming calls and proactively engage with patients.
Co-founder and CEO Edmund Jackson noted that the startup, founded in 2023, has a strategic focus on the healthcare business.
“What we’re trying to do is create great schedules. That’s our north star. We believe that what healthcare providers bring to market is patient time where the clinician is, and if you get that right, everything else will happen,” Jackson said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare, unveiling the StaffOps platform for the first time. “The first evolution so far was to use agents on the supply side to keep patients on schedule. But that’s only half the problem. The other half is the clinicians. How do you staff it? So not just the clinicians, but also the clinical technologists and other staff members. How do you get them in the right place at the right time to meet patient demand? How do you match them?”
Jackson argued that patient access and patient experience need to be aligned with staffing rather than treated as separate functions.
Currently, most healthcare providers deploy healthcare workers based on a fixed schedule with static, pre-planned shifts that do not keep up with the reality of patient demand, which changes from day to day or even hour to hour. Healthcare providers frequently deal with cancellations and staffing inconsistencies, leaving clinicians overworked in some areas and underutilized capacity in others.
UnityAI’s StaffOps integrates directly with EHR and HR systems, giving managers real-time visibility into patient appointments, including cancellations and rescheduling. Organizations can adjust staffing levels to match actual patient demand rather than static schedules. By continuously synchronizing staffing supply and patient volume, StaffOps enables a more dynamic staffing model that increases patient throughput while reducing unnecessary labor costs, executives said.
“The platform knows who our staff roster is, what their qualifications are, where they can work, where they can’t work, what their language preferences are, what their experience is. What patients are coming when and where? It optimizes the schedule and determines that this is mathematically optimal given these constraints,” Jackson said. “Clinic providers can manage all of that exception and handle patient transfers, PTO, call-on, call-off shift transactions. What’s really important is that most of our clients are based in multiple facilities, so we have a broad perspective, so we’re not just managing one clinic.”
StaffOps provides an integrated self-service platform for both frontline staff and field leaders. For healthcare professionals, this platform simplifies daily schedule management. Clinicians and staff can request shifts, release unavailable shifts, and submit paid time off requests through a single interface, eliminating the back-and-forth that often delays staffing adjustments. For staffing managers and field leaders, the StaffOps platform is designed to improve visibility and responsiveness, allowing them to more quickly identify and close coverage gaps caused by PTO and last-minute absences, reduce patient appointment cancellations, and maintain continuity of care, executives said.
Jackson noted that UnityAI’s efforts to apply agenttic AI to the work of healthcare professionals is indicative of a broader shift in which AI not only assists with documentation and analysis, but also begins to coordinate the actual work within provider organizations.
The vision, Jackson said, is to extend AI agents beyond scheduling to workforce optimization and autonomous workforce operations for all staff in a clinic. AI agents will be able to handle both aspects of the operation: supply and demand.
“That surgery takes up so much mental space and time and energy, so removing that friction from (facility managers) frees up time in the day to actually take care of patients in the clinic,” he said.
The company is developing an AI agent that can manage daily staffing decisions in real-time via voice and SMS text, including handling call-offs, coordinating shift exchanges, approving PTO requests, and adjusting coverage based on patient demand. The goal is to coordinate patient appointment arrangements and allow organizations to proactively manage access changes rather than being reactive, the company said.
UnityAI was founded 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 care orchestration technology to improve patient flow in hospital environments. The startup has shifted its focus to multi-site outpatient providers, working with radiology, dental, behavioral, substance abuse, primary care and other providers.
“We decided we needed to move faster to find customers who could apply AI to higher metabolic rate surgeries. What we found was that these multi-site outpatient providers were very well organized, wanted to move faster, and cared very deeply about their surgeries,” Jackson said.
UnityAI raised $8.5 million in a Series A round in March to accelerate efforts to develop an autonomous AI workforce across all healthcare operations.
