Throughout this Great Transition project, we have designed a solution to fight elders' isolation and abuse in EHPAD. CareJoy is an innovating tool aimed at improving: Time, Quality, and Cost efficiency of EHPAD’s labor force.
The Note of Intent, and Our Business Plan
I. The issue
More than 75% of EHPAD’s occupants suffer from a cardiovascular pathology, meanwhile 42% of them suffer from a brain disease. Overall, 730 000 elders are currently living in French EHPADs. The number of elders is increasing rapidly, and unfortunately many of them are currently victims of abuse in EHPAD, and their situation is getting worse.
It is important to acknowledge that elderly’s abuse in EHPAD, is not due to medical staff meanness. Rather it is a consequence of EHPAD overbooking and bad working conditions for its staff . More, there are not enough of them to take care of the elderly’s increasing demand (labour shortage) .
II. The Need
EHPAD have to both optimize its staff management and tackle labour shortage.
Thus, Improving time, quality, and cost efficiency of EHPADs labor force, is the key solution to prevent the abuse and isolation of the elderly.
III. The Solution
Our solution is CareJoy, an online platform that has two main purposes:
Improve Cost and Time efficiency: Through this application, when overwhelmed, EHPAD medical staff will be able to recruit temporary labor, directly through this application when specific needs that do not require medical skills come up(Eg. Meal Services, entertainment activities, surveillance, cleaning, delivering). The whole idea is to dematerialize the process of temporary workers recruitment and bring more flexibility for the EHPAD. These workers will have to achieve non medical activities so that medical staff can focus on their main tasks.
Improve Elder’s quality of life: Monitor each patients’ visitors and well-being through an application, that will send notifications to patient’s family, to keep them informed about how their relative is doing , and to remind them of visiting him/her on a regular basis.
IV. Risks
Our biggest challenge lies in the recruitment of temporary workers, for each and every EHPAD all around France. Considering, some regions will face greater difficulties in recruiting temporary labor force, we will create specific partnerships with local nursing schools. They will provide us a pool of potential workers, among their students.
V. Return On Investment
Following our Business Plan, that you may find in the PDF above, we acknowledge that our company won’t be profitable in the upcoming two years (Year 1 and Year 2), because of huge investments needed for Research & Development purposes. To that matter, we are planning on asking a bunch of public funds to finance our project, such as: national public grants (e.g: “BPI France”), local public grants (e,g: “Fond à la création d’entreprise de l’île de France”), and we will also apply for a free loan interest (“Scientipole”). More, in Year 2, we aim at recruiting additional salesforces, in order to help us attract more customers and to then reduce our fixed costs. Therefore, we believe that our company will only be able to generate positive earning benefits from Year 3.