This article is sponsored by Element5. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Joe Randesi, Co-founder & CEO of Element5, to talk about Element5’s agentic automation platform and how providers can leverage this technology within their unique workflows and infrastructures. He also provides a look at the company’s new solution, Neos, which orchestrates AI agents to perform and delegate work across the patient financial journey, leading to better efficiency and outcomes.
Home Health Care News: What is your background, and how did it lead you to Element5?
Joe Randesi: I’ve been in post-acute tech for almost 20 years. I spent 10 years on the EMR side, and that experience really helped me understand provider operations, their needs, and how to effectively apply technology. In our space, there’s a steep learning curve when it comes to post-acute care—the intricacies of how work gets done and the challenges providers face. Spending my career in this setting has given me a deep understanding of these dynamics, which has been invaluable to what we’re doing at Element5.
The reason I co-founded Element5 is that we saw a huge opportunity to bring automation solutions into the space—not as a replacement, but as a complement to existing software like EMRs and other systems providers rely on. Our belief is that no matter what industry you’re in or what system you use, there’s never a single solution that can do everything. That’s why you see major tech players like Microsoft and Salesforce offering extensive enterprise integrations. Element5 is bringing that same mindset to post-acute care.
Talk about some of the key challenges facing post-acute care providers today and the steps Element5 is taking to address these challenges.
Making sure providers have enough staff to keep up with the shift to Medicare Advantage is a massive issue in our industry. This shift isn’t slowing down—it’s only getting bigger, and it’s driving an increased workload around eligibility, authorizations, and compliance. There’s simply more work to do. And that work doesn’t live within just one system—it spans EMRs, payer portals, conveners, and clearinghouses. Getting it done requires connecting all of these systems.
Take the process of submitting and checking eligibility and authorizations—it’s lengthy, cumbersome, and without technology, it requires serious human firepower.
At Element5, we’re orchestrating AI agents across what we call the patient financial journey—covering eligibility, authorizations, and RCM—to augment operational teams managing these processes. Our AI agents take on the work so staff don’t have to, allowing them to focus on exceptions rather than repetitive tasks. The result is a more efficient operation, faster workflows, and ultimately, a happier workforce.
We just launched our newest solution, Neos. Neos brings deeper intelligence and a more intuitive experience, allowing operations to work seamlessly alongside AI agents.
What emerging technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on post-acute care in the near future?
If you look at the biggest tech trends today, the most successful SaaS products are going all-in on agentic AI. They’re investing heavily in AI agents because that’s where the work is heading. Automation and agentic AI performing intelligent tasks across complex systems and sophisticated processes are going to have a huge impact on our market.
We’ve talked about how cumbersome processes are putting massive strain on the existing workforce, and we know that workforce isn’t unlimited. There are only so many people available. The technology to solve these challenges already exists, and we’re big believers in applying it in ways that elevate the workforce—allowing them to focus on higher-level decisions and more valuable work. You see this in what we’re doing, but you also see it across other industries.
The second big area of AI advancement is in clinical documentation. AI-powered voice-to-structured data is becoming more common, and I think it’s incredibly exciting. I’ve seen some really innovative companies leveraging this technology so clinicians can speak naturally, and AI helps structure and document it correctly.
The overlap between these two technologies—agentic AI for workflow automation and AI for clinical documentation—is that both are designed with AI agents first, not humans manually entering data. They’re built to enable automation to do the work, with humans providing oversight and handling exceptions. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about software design.
I really believe both of these technologies are going to have a massive impact on this market.
What makes Element5 solutions unique?
Traditional SaaS is built for the business user—how they log in, how they interact with the product, how they navigate the interface. But our solutions, especially Neos, are designed for the job to be done. They’re built for the outcome. The entire mindset behind the design is to make processes as efficient as possible by offloading work to AI agents that make decisions, communicate, and perform actions.
That design shift is what truly sets us apart, and you can see it in what we deploy for our clients. The goal is to minimize the work done by the human workforce. Instead, staff should focus on oversight, making critical decisions, and working in harmony with AI agents. That’s the core of what we’re building at Element5.
With that said, this might sound like a deep technical detail, but we actually think of the business user as a type of agent. In automation and agentic AI, we have business cases where tasks are routed to a human agent or workforce agent to work alongside automated agents. That kind of approach is very different from a traditional SaaS product.
We believe our design philosophy makes us truly unique in the market. And because we’re in health care, it’s critical to blend the human workforce with AI technology in a way that’s both practical and effective. Especially in health care, you need oversight, approvals, governance, and the ability to track what didn’t work so you can refine processes and work by exception. Our solutions build that entire ecosystem on top of AI agents, creating a balanced and intelligent system for our clients.
As a partner, how does Element5 help agencies effectively navigate technology adoption and implementation?
We spend a lot of time educating our clients on the expected outcome—that’s key. We take steps to ensure they’ve validated the use case and fully understand what the agents will do and why. When you’re talking about autonomous decision-making and autonomous actions, it requires a lot of trust. You used the word “faith,” and I think that’s exactly what it is—clients need faith to hand these processes over to technology. That’s why our preparation and education process is so in-depth.
We work with clients through a methodical, comfortable rollout plan to build their confidence. We’ll start small—running three transactions, for example—so they can review every detail. Then we scale up to five, then ten, whatever cadence makes sense for them. It’s all done in a controlled way to ensure confidence at every step.
Our onboarding process is structured but flexible, with configuration options tailored to each provider’s operations. Every provider works a little differently, so we conduct detailed fact-finding sessions to set things up the right way from the start.
We also capture success factors early—before we even go live. We ask, “What are you looking to get out of this? What do you expect the outcomes to be?” Then we track and report back to ensure their goals are being met. We take a highly collaborative, partnership-driven approach to rolling out technology.
This consultative relationship is a winning strategy, to be honest. We start slow and methodical, but once a client has their first solution running in production, the second rollout is a completely different experience. The trust is there, and they’re like, “We get it. We know what you’re doing. Let’s go.” The process moves faster as clients gain comfort with the technology.
We’re confident in the amount of work we’ve done—not just on the technology itself, but in preparing clients, helping them manage change, and ensuring they can fully leverage the technology. Because in the end, that’s just as important as the technology itself.
What is on the horizon for Element5 and its customers?
We have an aggressive roadmap for Neos. Neos is expanding across eligibility, authorizations, and RCM operations, with a focus on making our AI agents more intelligent, expanding their capabilities, and improving communication and integration with existing staff.
For example, we’re adding intelligence to authorization agents to better predict when an authorization is needed, why it’s needed, and ensuring it’s submitted and processed on time to eliminate care gaps. Our goal is to enhance intelligence around whether an authorization is likely to be approved, verifying that the submitted data is correct by comparing it to historical data, and assessing the risk of scheduling before an authorization is back.
All of this—intelligent decision-making, analytics, and reducing manual workload—is what we’re focused on. In addition to expanding reporting, analytics, and modeling to help clients better understand their data, we’re using that intelligence to improve outcomes. That’s the goal. If today we’re successfully automating X percent of an operation, how do we double that? That’s where we’re putting our R&D investment.
Finish this sentence … “In the home-based care industry, 2025 will be shaped by…”
…providers who embrace emerging technology and innovation.
What we’re seeing is impressive—not just with Element5, but across the industry. I was just at Home Care 100, and there are tons of companies doing really innovative work. The technology outside of our space is incredible, and it’s driving the application of those advancements into post-acute care.
The providers that understand the bigger picture—where technology is headed—and figure out how to leverage vendors purpose-built for post-acute, like Element5, while also integrating broader, industry-agnostic technology into their operations, are the ones positioning themselves for long-term success.
The organizations that recognize these opportunities—not just in 2025, but in the years to come—are going to get ahead. It’s going to shape their success and redefine their operational models for the future.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Element5’s Neos solution orchestrates AI agents to streamline operations across the patient financial journey. You can learn more about Element5 and workflow automation at www.e5.ai
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
