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How to Start a Senior Home Care Business in Canada, USA?: Top Opportunities + 7 Steps

Looking to Start a Senior Home Care Business in Canada and the USA?

You’re in the right place.

Did you know that Canadians aged 65 and older spent over 45% of their total healthcare expenditures on healthcare in 2019?

By 2040, this is projected to reach over 70%. That’s just one reason why starting a senior home care business is an excellent opportunity.

In this blog, we’ve got everything you need to get started, including a comprehensive guide to:

  • launching your business
  • profitable senior care possibilities
  • top startup recommendations to inspire your business
  • technical strategies

So let’s dive in!

The Essential Checklist for Launching Your Own Senior Home Care

Adopting technology is crucial to thriving in the senior care market. That’s why we’re focusing on a tech-enabled senior home care business.

How to start a senior care business?

Step 1: Identify the problem

Look around, ask seniors, read a lot, take interviews, study surveys, talk to industry experts and do a lot of brainstorming to identify the senior care problems.

Here, you will have two options – either go for a very common senior care problem that multiple players like you are trying to solve or go for a rare senior care problem which no one has yet focused on.

Step 2: Explore 100 solutions, choose only 1

Once you have identified the senior care problem, time to explore solutions. But don’t limit yourself while looking for solutions.

Always aim to find as many as solutions you can.

However, just select the one most practical solution which works best for all of your stakeholders.

Step 3: Prepare monetization strategies

Without proper monetization strategies, all efforts on even the best business idea will go into vein.

Thus, explore potential ways you can make money. Align value proposition and revenue streams.

Also, aim to generate multiple revenue streams as surviving with just one revenue stream is no longer a good choice.

Step 4: Plan tech infrastructure for your home care business

Believe it or not, technology is the only feasible way to reach your business to millions of users.

Otherwise, you will settle in just a small neighbourhood.

Thus, you should plan whether just a website will work for you or you will need to adopt an online web or mobile platform.

Furthermore, you also need to plan the capital cost required to build tech infrastructure.

Step 5: Draft compliance strategy

You become liable for healthcare compliance regardless of the type of healthcare business you are into.

You have to address all applicable healthcare data privacy laws and other legal things to become compliance-ready.

Drafting a compliance strategy while being in the early stage of the business gives you a broad idea of what you need to achieve, what you need to document, the number of resources you would require and how much it cost to be compliant.

Step 6: Work on the marketing part

You must already be familiar with traditional marketing methodologies. So, let us give you a new perspective on marketing.

There is a fairly new concept of product-led marketing.

In this, your product (website, online web or mobile app) attracts new customers by delivering an outstanding experience to initial or existing customers.

This is why you don’t have to sell senior home care services.

You have to sell experience!

Because, users may forget your services, but they always remember how nicely you treat them!

Step 7: Launch it and then scale it up

Once you feel confident with all tech, business and compliance infrastructure and strategy, time to hit the market.

But, always be flexible to adopt new changes.

Serve each patient personally or at least be an active participant in his user journey.

This will help you understand what your business lacks.

Based on this knowledge which you receive directly from your users, upgrade your platform, policies, and services and scale it up to the next level with the new learnings.

This is an endless process!

Ready to Invest in Senior Care?
Discover the Most Profitable Business Opportunities in Canada and USA

We’ll go step-by-step.

To evaluate the worthiness of any startup or business opportunity, it’s crucial to identify the target audience and their pain points.

For this research, we followed the same strategy and discovered four distinct user groups with varying challenges. Keep reading to learn more about our process and findings.

Profitable senior home care business ideas

User Group 1: Families of older adults

Family members are most responsible for the well-being of older adults.

They don’t want to see their elderly family members in pain.

They want to give their elderly family members the best possible care while themselves not getting distracted from their daily life.

But here is what they face a challenge, a major one.

A major problem they are facing:

They can’t easily find trustworthy caregivers who look after their elderly family members in the best way.

Many times, they require on-demand caregivers while many times on a long-term basis. But it is hard for them to experience such flexibility when it comes to finding and hiring caregivers.

Eldercare business possibility:

You can start a senior caregiving company and build a platform or just a website to connect professional caregivers and family members of older adults.

Using your platform, they can easily find and hire caregivers for any sort of senior care task either manually by themselves or automatically by algorithm-based matching.

Find inspiration:

San Francisco-based Honor we just discussed is offering home care service for seniors through experienced caregivers.

Using Honor Family App, family members can schedule and see care visits and when caregivers arrive and leave, family members get detailed care notes.

User Group 2: Older adults themselves

There are many elderly people in Canada who are living alone (or with family) but taking care of their health and wellness by themselves.

Major problems they are facing:

  • They don’t remember their medication plan.
  • They don’t remember their diet plan and cannot track what they eat.
  • They frequently need help with light housekeeping, personal care and transportation.
  • They feel alone which affects their mental health.

Senior care business possibilities:

  • Build a tech platform or app for medication reminders. Let them easily explore everything related to their medication plan and if they have any doubts, let them virtually talk to pharmacists or care teams.
  • Build a diet app for seniors to let them track what they eat, get food suggestions and follow the diet plan to achieve their dietary goals.
  • Let them find and hire caregivers online based on their needs through a platform for in-home care.
  • Build a dedicated mental health platform for seniors to help them with sleep & mood tracking, reminders, relaxation techniques, meditation and easy chat or video calls with therapists.
  • Start a meal delivery service and delivers nutrition-rich food to seniors based on their healthcare and wellness needs.
  • Or build a senior care super app to address all such issues of seniors in a single shot from a single app.

User Group 3: Home care agency owners

Home care agencies are the most crucial pillar of the senior care ecosystem.

They provide professional home care on a large scale to individual seniors.

But due to their large-scale operations, they face several operational and business challenges.

Major problems they are facing:

  • They struggle to establish coordination between their back-office team, care team and family members of seniors.
  • They cannot digitally track each senior care operation.
  • They cannot collect and share real-time information and updates on senior care.
  • They cannot attain productivity with their back-office work by optimizing operations.

Eldercare startup possibility:

You can solve all such problems of home care agencies by building a SaaS platform.

With this platform, home care agencies can automatically assign senior home care tasks with all details to their caregivers.

Caregivers can reach locations with built-in navigation. Once they reach, they can complete assigned tasks and update online which automatically sends to family members and a back-office team of home care agencies.

Family members, caregivers and back-office team can communicate and coordinate with the built-in chat option.

Automatic report generation and sharing minimizes errors and saves time.

Overall, home care agencies can deliver better care, optimize operations and grow their business

User Group 4: Long-term care homes

A total of 2076 LTC homes in Canada are home to around 200,000 elderly people.

During the pandemic, we all witnessed how LTC homes completely failed to protect our seniors.

And that is when we all also witnessed the serious problems they are facing.

Major problems they are facing:

  • LTC homes struggle with administrative paper-based work.
  • LTC homes struggle with residents’ medication management.
  • LTC homes struggle with coordination between RN, RPN, pharmacists, physicians and DOC.
  • LTC homes cannot keep eye on residents’ health 24/7.
  • LTC homes struggle with staff shortages.

Eldercare business possibilities:

  • Same for home care agencies, you can build a custom SaaS platform for LTC homes. With this platform, LTC homes can manage all data of residents online. Physicians can treat residents virtually and write ePrescriptions which get shared with pharmacies automatically. RN, RPN can get all details of each resident’s medication on point of care devices.
  • You can also build a remote patient monitoring system for LTC homes to 24/7 monitor the vital body signs of residents.
  • You can build a platform to let LTC homes hire experienced caregivers online on a temporary and on-demand basis.
  • Overall, we have shared around 9 startup ideas for the senior care industry. Let’s now share some of our valuable resources to help you in the execution of these ideas.

Finding Inspiration for Your Senior Home Care Business?

Taking a closer look at existing startups can provide valuable inspiration for your own venture.

By studying their strategies and successes, you can gain insights into the market and develop profitable tactics for attracting customers and achieving a higher ROI.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, these inspiring examples can help you make a real difference in the lives of seniors in your community.

1. Dispatch Health

Dispatch Health

Dispatch Health is considered one of the most successful senior care startups in the USA.

As a home care business, it offers same-day healthcare services across 23 states.

It enables the patient to get home care services in just 3 simple steps.

Request a visit via call or using the home care app

The professional medical team visits the patient’s home

The team manages – prescription, billing and insurance coverage on behalf of the patient

Because of their patient-centric care approach and highly-skilled medical professionals team, Dispatch Health recently raised a whopping $330M in order to expand their home care business across the USA.

📌 You must also read: How to build home care app?

2. Honor

Honor

Honor has the world’s largest home care network.

Its powerful and most advanced care platform is the prior reason behind it.

Honor’s app enables seniors to –

  • Set up a care visit
  • Schedule the time and location
  • Get an initial update after every home care visit
  • See who’s coming and – when they arrive and leave
  • Visit reminders and provide feedback
  • Insights into overall wellness and well-being

3. Papa

Papa

This senior care startup is known for its flexible family care support.

It helps seniors and their families to connect with real people for their companion care and day-to-day activities.

What’s so special about Papa is that – it also offers virtual care solutions!

4. ConcertoCare

ConcertoCare

Based in the USA, ConcertoCare focuses on the three segments of in-home care services.

  • ConcertoCare Partners (for patients seeking complex care needs)
  • In-home primary care provider (for patients seeking normal physical and mental health needs)
  • PACE Services (all-in-one care solution at home including dentistry and emergency services)

5. Devoted Health

Devoted Health

This senior care startup is not just limited to elder care solutions.

But also offers them medicare advantage plans.

Its cutting-edge platform also enables seniors to –

  • Search for doctors and online pharmacies
  • Look for prescription drug coverage
  • Access health and wellness solutions

Our these valuable resources will surely help you to plan and execute your senior home care business in Canada, USA

We’re an Ontario-based healthcare IT company. We always aim to create an easy path for healthcare providers and entrepreneurs with our resources and our healthcare tech, business and compliance expertise.

Following are our some of the very useful resources for you.

1. Top 7 profitable senior care business ideas for North America

Here, we have listed out most trending and commercially successful senior care business ideas based on our experience, observation and conversation with industry experts.

2. Building IoT-enabled healthcare app for senior care (case study) 

We have built an IoT-enabled senior care app for USA’s biggest PACE provider to let it offer at-home senior care services with real time patient monitoring feature.

3. White-label telehealth solution for senior care

In this blog, we’ve shared every single detail of our white-label telemedicine platform and its senior care use case along with its real app screens. This blog will give you idea of telemedicine technology and software.

If you still have any doubts, our healthcare IT experts are here to guide you through all technical, business and compliance requirements.