It was announced in the past few weeks that one of the tech-enabled home care start-ups, HomeHero, closed its doors. For a quick background, Silicon Valley has become interested in Home Care recently and funded three very well publicized start-ups called Honor, Home Team, and HomeHero. Each of these companies started with more than $20M in funding. You can read some previous articles at these links:

• Tech-Enabled Home Care is Coming - Here's Some Proof

• Can Your Agency Compete with the 3 Home-igos?

Good News and Bad News

On the one hand, as someone who started or grew a home care business without a lot of venture capital, it should be heartening to know that you're still here and HomeHero is not. That's some good news!

The bad news is that our industry faces challenges that can ONLY be solved with better technology. In the coming years the number of Americans over 80 will triple, the pool of available caregivers will decrease, and minimum wage is likely to rise. Technology is the only answer that will make your home care agency viable in the next generation. 

Some Specifics about HomeHero

In my opinion, HomeHero was the most "Uber-like" of the tech-enabled start-ups that we discussed. Let me explain:

• From the passenger perspective, Uber is an app to connect you with drivers that have been vetted by Uber for having a nice newish car and a clean driving record. HomeHero prided themselves on the vetting.

• Uber pays the drivers most of the money. HomeHero tried to do the same.

• Uber ran into the issue of drivers wanting to be compensated as employees. Uber faced this too but since it doesn't affect all of their geographies, it only maimed them and didn't kill them. In the case of HomeHero, it did kill them.

I've read several articles from people I respect about the HomeHero situation, and like most articles about business failure, the articles strongly criticize Kyle Hill, the HomeHero CEO. My perspective is different! I've had the privilege of talking with Kyle and advising him on a TED talk. I've also learned a lot from him about what he was trying to do with HomeHero and how he ran his company. I respect and admire him a great deal, and I'm confident that we'll see him again.

Next Generation Home Care

Above, where I talked about the "bad news," I said that there are inevitable changes in our industry that will ultimately cause every agency that doesn't embrace technology to fail. In order to help make sure that your agency isn't one of them, we offer you our latest free eBook, "Blueprint for the Next Generation of Healthcare at Home" Just click the link or the image below to download it.