Planbase Technologies Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered employee management platform for healthcare, today announced its launch with $2.1 million in funding.

The investment round was joined by Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and several prominent angels. Planbase said it will use the funding to expand efforts to court medium-sized and large clinics nationwide and grow its software engineering team.

Co-founded by a married couple, Joe Shearman and Jack Light (pictured), Planbase is the second startup they have launched together. Their previous company, Elando, was an AI schedule forecasting platform they spun out of the University of Chicago.

“Six years ago, if you had a cold, you’d go into a clinic. Now you might text your doctor or get on a Zoom link,” Shearman told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview. “Just managing doctors’ time across time zones and all these different methods becomes really complex.”

Tasks surrounding the administration of scheduling, pay and predicting patient volumes present a problem that could be offloaded to AI. Shearman explained that the healthcare industry is changing with telehealth and hybrid firms, which puts additional burden on staffing administration.

Hybrid clinics, straddling exam rooms and Zoom calls, often operate “blind,” never quite sure how many clinicians to schedule or where to place them. With many still relying on spreadsheets and frantic message threads, staffing can fall apart the moment demand shifts.

Most clinical staffing tools were built before telehealth, resulting in fragmented systems that do not talk to one another. Shearman said Planbase’s key insight was that AI only works if it controls the workflows and data. As a result, the company built a full-stack platform that unifies staffing, credentialing, payroll and demand forecasting.

Its core capabilities include patient-volume prediction, dynamic scheduling and a generative user interface layer that lets administrators type what they want to do and have the system create the interface and actions automatically. Routine tasks, such as adjusting schedules or confirming licensure status, are handled by AI agents.

Predicting and preparing for changes in patient visits can be a common pain point for clinics. For example, providers must often account for seasonal shifts in illness, such as spikes in flu cases.

“We use machine learning to forecast patient volumes… and we use AI to generate the user interface on the fly depending on what they’re trying to do,” Shearman said.

The system intelligently customizes its UI according to the role of the user. For example, a doctor doesn’t need to interact with the AI; their most common touchpoint is through mobile, where they see schedules and receive updates via Slack, text or email. The AI support is designed for back-office administration teams, nurse managers and executive-level staff.

“We’ve got nursing managers building the most crazy complex and sophisticated staffing plans, which we never thought about to build before,” Shearman added. “And we’ve had people up at 1 a.m. typing away, building these cool things messaging us with ‘Hey, this was amazing. I love it.'”

One customer, OpenLoop Health Inc., is a fast-growing telehealth platform that supports more than 2,000 doctors across the United States.

“Planbase has essentially automated many of our scheduling workflows and really improved how we handle all the new operations and areas we’re expanding into,” said OpenLoop Practice Manager Noah Van Eldik. “We’ve already increased patient volume by 40% and reduced scheduling time by 70% across our entire provider operations team.”

The company’s platform can fully automate employee management for healthcare clinics, from onboarding and tracking licenses to assisting with scheduling, payroll and performance management. By automating these tasks, Planbase said, large clinics can save hundreds, or even thousands, of hours per month.

Image: Planbase