"Creating a Platform Connecting All Healthcare Services Beyond Caregiving"

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[Asia Economy Reporter Youngwon Kim]"Our goal is to become a platform that connects all healthcare services beyond just caregiving."

As South Korea is expected to enter a super-aged society by 2025, with those aged 65 and older making up 20% of the population, interest in caregiving services is also rising significantly. HMC Networks launched the caregiver matching platform ‘CareNation’ in July 2020. It was the first time caregiving services, which had been operated in the form of offline staffing offices, were transformed into a mobile platform. CareNation has consistently maintained the number one market share in the industry.

On the 13th, Seodae Geon, CEO of HMC Networks, introduced CareNation as "a solution that addresses the problems of caregiving companies that had been operating as scattered organizations." Before caregiving platforms emerged, caregivers typically registered with 3 to 4 caregiving companies. However, they had to prepay several months’ worth of caregiver liability insurance premiums for each company they registered with, and caregiving companies had chronic issues such as settling payments only 2 to 3 weeks later to retain caregivers as customers. On-site, conflicts over ‘appropriate pricing’ sometimes arose due to differences between caregivers’ expectations and patients’ conditions.

CareNation solved this problem by introducing a bidding system. Patients and their guardians and caregivers directly set prices according to the patient’s condition. Guardians can choose based on caregivers’ ratings and proposed prices, and caregivers can propose prices depending on the patient’s condition. Once caregiving work through CareNation is completed, the caregiving fee is deposited the next day into a virtual account within the application (app). CEO Seo explained, "Since the caregiving market has more demand than supply, improving convenience for caregivers as suppliers is absolutely necessary."

Recently, for the first time in the industry, CareNation introduced an automatic enrollment product for caregiver liability insurance in collaboration with Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance. Caregivers can enroll in insurance with a single signature per job through the CareNation app. CEO Seo said, "The existing caregiving market was based on cash transactions and group insurance enrollment, so individual caregivers had no way to prove their experience," adding, "Having insurance records by job will also serve as proof of experience."

CareNation has continued to explore the caregiving field even after the app launch. One example is the monthly ‘Caregiving Trend Report’ published since April last year. The background for creating the first caregiving report was the hardship experienced during the investment process. CEO Seo said, "Investors always asked, ‘What is the size of the caregiving market?’ but at that time, such data did not exist." He added, "To prepare investor relations (IR) materials, we formed a data team and accumulated data while providing nationwide services," and "Because of those difficult experiences, we wanted startups and venture capitalists (VCs) interested in the caregiving market to freely access information, which led to the publication of the report."

At the end of May to early June, ‘CareNation 2.0’ is set to be released. CEO Seo and HMC Networks employees are in the final stages of preparing CareNation 2.0. According to CEO Seo, CareNation 2.0 will include services never before seen in the world, in addition to existing healthcare platform functions such as hospital search and medication guidance. It will also include funeral services developed in collaboration with Boram Sangjo. CEO Seo stated, "CareNation will connect all the services needed from the moment a family member becomes a patient until after full recovery and living the remaining life," adding, "We are preparing not only 2.0 in the first half of the year but also 3.0."

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