Bill Tymoszczuk co-founded BestHomeHealthCare.com to provide the type of resources he wishes he could’ve had while living with and caring for his Alzheimer’s disease-stricken father for three years.
The company’s mission is to connect families in need of home healthcare to a wide range of providers — nurses, housekeepers, hospice companies and home remodelers who specialize in making homes senior-friendly. The site is free for registered users who can browse provider listings by zip code and post “care requests,” in which they list the health services they’re looking for, how much they’re willing to pay and other relevant information.
Inspired by the difficulties he faced in researching home health industries and coordinating his father’s care, Tymoszczuk incorporated the company in 2008 and launched it a year later at a national home-care conference.
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Though it’s difficult to find specific projections on the future value of the home care market, it appears the trends are on BestHomeHealthCare’s side. U.S. spending on home care more than doubled (pdf) to $64.7 billion in 2008, compared to expenditures from seven years earlier, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Further, spending on home care was increasing at a much greater clip than U.S. spending on overall healthcare, according to CMS’ data.
Tymoszczuk is hoping that his company is well-positioned to capitalize on those shifts in U.S. healthcare. A top competitor, Care.com, has the same idea, though its model is to charge care seekers, not care providers.
Thus far, about 1,500 providers have registered on the site, giving BestHomeHealthCare a presence in every major U.S. city, according to Tymoszczuk. The company’s running a promotion in which it offers providers three months of free listings on the site, then charges $99 for a year of listings. In its early stages, the company has focused most of its energy on signing up providers and building its website.
But that’s about to change as the company enters what it hopes is its next stage of growth — attracting care-seekers. Its success — or lack thereof — in luring that group is likely to go a long way in determining the company’s staying power.
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The company is planning to use a number of channels to attract care seekers’ eyeballs, including e-mail marketing. But the centerpiece of its sales and marketing strategy is to partner with trade organizations and nonprofits like AARP, which have members who are likely consumers of home healthcare.
“I would rather put money into developing programs for nonprofits and their members than pay companies like Google and Yahoo for someone to click on an advertisement,” Tymoszczuk said.
To fuel sales and marketing, BestHomeHealthCare is looking to raise about $500,000 from angel investors, Tymoszczuk said.
