What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

Beneficiaries

Finding senior care isn’t easy for service users, their families, or clinicians engaged in outpatient management, care referrals or social prescribing.

Pain Points

1. Low visibility of care & support options, especially the under utilised voluntary sector, which impairs access to services, leading to compromise.

2. Difficult to match service user needs, evaluate, or compare options which are visible. Availability is unknown.

3. Offline, inefficient communication makes the enquiry process laborious for both care seeker & provider.

4. Care provider’s customer preferences are not considered, leading to unqualified enquiries which cannot be serviced.

5. Often, this search is a recurring pain point as individuals’ needs inevitably change.

Theme

CareRadar will create a digital community of senior care & support services which will help to identify & evaluate alternatives to traditional outpatient appointments and to engage seniors throughout their care journey.

What does your project aim to achieve?

CareRadar is a digital marketplace which connects care seekers with service providers based on both parties’ bespoke needs.

Objectives

1. Create choice and remove boundaries by bringing care & support service providers in to one digital resource. This will improve visibility & accessibility of services through an intuitive & simple to use web application, which enables self care.

2. Match the bespoke needs of the service user with the customer preferences of the service provider.

3. Demonstrate which services are currently taking on new service users, via an availability indicator.

4. Engage the community and voluntary sector as a preventative health measure and as an alternative to traditional outpatient appointments.

5. Improve efficiency of communication between care provider & care seeker during the enquiry stage.

How will the project be delivered?

Project Management

I will be leading the project, utilising my experience with high growth businesses in both an academic & commercial capacity.

Support & Networks

-Lancaster University – academic partner where necessary.
-Innovation Agency North West Coast.
-EIT Health Alumni Network (Pan European).
-Alumnus of Entrepreneurial Spark Business Accelerator (Natwest/KPMG).

Risk Management

We are in a position to make an impact quickly, with the project comprehensively technically planned & a considerable amount of software already developed. With a small number of providers already on the pre-launch platform.

Development Capability

We have engaged 2 software engineers with 30 years of development experience between them and create high spec user experiences at a competitive hourly rate.

Acknowledgements

Technation; we have been acknowledged as one to watch in ‘Tech for Social Good’ and referenced on Forbes.com.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

Learning, sharing & collaborating

There is significant potential to raise awareness of products for seniors to maintain their independence, improve their wellbeing & safety through the intended user base of the platform. CareRadar could become a conduit for testing and sharing new products & services.

CareRadar inherently shares information regarding the services that are listed on the platform and puts them in front of anyone who is searching for senior care services online.

Communication

Progress & learning will be shared via social media, the Q community & at any conference invites that may arise.

Evaluation

The following measures will be key early KPIs.

-Number of provider accounts created.
-Number of unique care seeker accounts.
-Number of searches / provider views / enquiries / messages.
-Digital KPIs include traffic, conversion rates, page views.
-Geographic spread.

Further more, CareRadar users will be interviewed to qualitatively evaluate the benefits of using CareRadar.