The VM Grant on SHAFE successful business models analysed and indexed business models developed in Europe, Unites States and Australia, focusing on supporting ageing in place.
The care providers look now for innovative approaches in order to make the long- term care sustainable. Hence, preventive care is coupled with digital technologies, while also involving informal caregivers. All these, overall, decrease costs to the extent to which a health and care ecosystem could partly support the digitization, technological and knowledge transfer, and the adoption of innovation at fast
rates. From the VM results, we learned that most of the services are variations of B2B and B2C and subscription-based services. The B2B model would provide a higher penetration rate, taking into consideration that assisting technology would lower the cost per user by offloading the manual medical parameters measurements and thus reducing the necessary human resources. Even if technology proved its reliability, the B2C model business is not as successful as the B2B model because for many cases the data which is obtained by the end-user is of no relevance or too detailed, or biased towards too medical or too technical content (e.g. data from environmental sensors, medical condition). Moreover, in the future, Uber-like market place for domiciliary care services, revenue based on sales commission from care receiver and care givers would be potentially successful business models.
The main conclusions taken and disseminated are that there are some barriers to penetrate the market that are related to some other factors, and not necessarily to the business model. Some of these factors are the low adoption rate, the perceived privacy threat, lack of consistent added value, results and analyses not being delivered to the carer in a user-friendly format and/or a one-glimpse understanding one.