Find A Nurse

The number of elderly is rapidly increasing while the majority of family members are rapidly losing their ability to look after their elderly. 

Family members face challenges while searching for trusted nurses. Accessing trusted home care can be very time consuming, stressful, expensive, and sometimes unavailable such as in rural areas. In addition, it adds a burden on family members to conduct reference and background checks on the nurses.

Meanwhile, nurses, especially in Lebanon, suffer from the low salaries paid by the hospitals especially when compared to the lengthy, hectic working schedules. 

Seeking better payment rates, they seek opportunities in the informal and disorganized home nursing sector which puts them at the risk of abuse and exploitation.

As a result, nurses are abandoning their profession or seeking better opportunities abroad which are seriously affecting the healthcare system in the region. 

Find A Nurse is a technology-based home care startup that aims to become the first reliable platform that organizes the informal home care chaotic sector, by not only facilitating for nurses to access flexible employment opportunities but also allowing clients to find qualified nurses quickly and in an affordable manner.

We are building a user-friendly digital interface to let families easily communicate their particular needs and preferences. Our smart algorithm recommends the best-matching nurses among which families are given the ability to browse the profiles of the shortlist of the nurses that are recommended based on proximity, gender preferences, time availability and other factors.

In addition, the caregiver portal that we are developing allows nurses to easily update their availabilities in real-time, change their requested fees per services, update their work preferences, and receive geo-targeted requests from clients.

Our solution targets both families who receive our home care support services and the caregivers who provide such services. Our caregivers are our primary beneficiaries; these are predominantly females who come from underserved communities (80% of our caregivers). We already have more than 300 caregivers on our platform and we have served more than 650 families.

Our system will employ a smart dispatch system that constantly improves the quality of its match predictions and eliminates the need to transport caregivers long distances, enhancing overall performance, extending the home care to remote areas, and minimizing the associated costs on the patient.

IMPACT ON CAREGIVERS (SDG 5&8)

1. Balancing caregiver-client power dynamics: uplifting caregivers' self-confidence via training them on life skills and communication skills

2. Protecting caregivers' rights and preventing exploitation (e.g. unpaid extra services, fees bargaining, burnout, denying their rights to off days, unfair cancellations and rescheduling)

3. Enhanced access to flexible work in healthy working conditions especially to our vulnerable target segments (females from marginalized communities) that originally lacked proper access to professional employment opportunities

4. Creating a reputable brand that alleviates the stereotypes associated with women working in "strangers' homes"

5. Promote safety via our policies, procedures and client-caregiver contracts.

·

IMPACT ON FAMILIES (SDG 3)

1. Affordability: Promoting healthy competition for price and quality among caregivers

2. Safety: public reviews and verified profiles help families make better informed decisions

3. Accessibility: enhancing home care accessibility and extending it to remote areas

4. Elevating family well-being: alleviating the risk of family-caregiver burnout

Hussein Sleiman as the CEO, is the visionary entrepreneur on the team. He is currently in charge of setting marketing and growth strategies, improving user experience, raising capital, handling public relations, and overseeing operations. His leadership skills, business acumen, and public speaking skills are among his strengths that enable him to lead the startup team.

Diana as the Nursing Operations Manager, is a registered nurse with 10+ years of experience in the Neonatal intensive critical unit and child care settings. She is also a single mum blogger and enjoys creating social media content. Her passion and experience as a mother has led her to embrace Find A Nurse’s mission to support new and/or working mothers throughout their motherhood journey. Ms. Diana is responsible for managing our team, case management, supporting business development, and quality control and assurance. 

Both team leads have proximity to the communities they serve by actively engaging with community members and stakeholders to better understand their needs and preferences. For example, actively attending community meetings and conducting surveys to gather feedback and insights from community members. By doing so, they can gain valuable insights into the unique challenges and opportunities facing the community and tailor their services to meet those needs.

Transparency and open communication with community members are also prioritized, keeping them informed about the progress of the project and soliciting their feedback throughout the development process.

Our solution targets both families who receive our home care support services and the caregivers who provide such services. Our caregivers are our primary beneficiaries; these are predominantly females who come from underserved communities (80% of our caregivers). We already have more than 300 caregivers on our platform and we have served more than 650 families.

Find A Nurse will benefit greatly from all the support provided by the program and in particular access to mentorship, technical advisory, as well as advice on financing mechanisms, access to extended international networks of customers and channel partners, entrepreneurs, high-level business executives, and international market soft landings. We expect that we’ll receive the needed exposure and guidance to be able to develop and implement marketing and sales plans and become more ready to enter international markets and establish international business entities.

We plan to to build an AI-powered, user-friendly tool that analyzes families' unique care needs and, using a smart-matching algorithm, determines the caregiver-client total compatibility score, shortlists the qualified healthcare professionals, then recommends the optimal caregiver based on a set of variables that include proximity, qualifications, ratings, gender preferences, and time availability. 

Such a system will employ a smart dispatch system that constantly improves the quality of its match predictions and eliminates the need to transport caregivers long distances, enhancing overall performance, extending the home care to remote areas, and minimizing the associated costs on the patient.

 Our overall goal is to revolutionize the home healthcare industry, which has the following 

1. Reduce patients’ waiting time in emergency cases due to quick geo-targeted home-based responses 

2. Reduce the cost of healthcare when delivered at home

3. reduce the pressure on healthcare institutions by focusing on the home-based early nurse-led discharge of patients 

4. Combat unemployment and solve aging population needs in one shot

5. Empowering vulnerable groups who make up the majority of home care workers

6. Decrease the need for institutionalized care by early, preventative healthcare intervention 

 Our envisioned model for an online home care marketplace makes finding, hiring, and managing home healthcare providers easier, smarter, more affordable, and more reliable. Our solution will bring convenience, transparency, and high personalization to families who struggle to access home care services on-demand. Find A Nurse has the potential, given its scalability, to transform the home care industry and reduce costs on patients while improving their experience.

Goals:

• To streamline onboarding caregivers and serving families, enhance our cost-efficiency, and boost our scalability.
• To build a SaaS product that would support the growth of the home care industry as a whole and to adopt a collaborative mindset to convert these agencies from COMPETITORS into PARTNERS with aligned interests.

Our online platform is designed to make the selection of the right caregiver for families quick, easy and problem-free. It allows them to browse a big pool of handpicked caregivers and check their profiles, qualifications, and experiences.

In addition, the caregiver portal that we're developing allows caregivers to easily update their locations, availability, profiles, and requested fees in real-time.

For a small markup fee, we eliminate families’ need to vet caregivers, shorten the client-caregiver matching process, and take away the hassle of tracking caregiver timesheets and payments.

The home care industry is run by outdated agencies. Their caregivers get less than 50% of what clients pay, the care quality is compromised due to lack of transparency, and families cannot choose their caregivers, due to limited supply and inability for manual matching to personalize the service.

Due to their inefficiencies, agencies created problems of overpriced services, underpaid caregivers, and low overall satisfaction in this industry. 

We believe that, given the right resources, our solution can be a threat to these businesses.

However, instead of competing with home care companies, we plan to use our technology to build a SaaS product that would support the growth of the home care industry as a whole and to adopt a collaborative mindset to convert these agencies from COMPETITORS into PARTNERS with aligned interests. As such, our technology will help them cut their running costs, provide them with an enhanced online presence, and enable a superior customer experience which will boost their profitability. 

As such, over the coming years, we will be transitioning our business model to B2B2C model where we onboard agencies to become vendors on our platform and scale internationally.

In order to track our enterprise’ sustainability to serve its mission, we track the following  set of KPIs:

The number of caregivers on the platform, their churn rate and total hours of care provided. The number of families worked with (total, monthly, weekly…). The conversion rate of  leads to paying clients, the churn rate, and the rebooking rate. We also track the number of jobs created for caregivers in full-time-equivalent (FTE). We track costs to obtain a lead and a client and the LifeTime Value (LTV) in order to study the financial sustainability of the activities.

Moreover, we track the impact of our services on families via surveys that take qualitative and quantitative feedback. We ask families to rate the quality of service they received, the ease of the service, their satisfaction, and written reviews about our caregivers. In order to track the improvement in the working conditions of caregivers, we collect their feedback and we ask them to review the families they have worked with to share the experience with other caregivers. 

IMPACT HYPOTHESIS

If we build an automated user journey by developing our online platform, then we will increase our monthly job creation from 15 to 30 Full Time Equivalent FTE in a 24 months period, and ultimately support decent work and economic growth in Lebanon. 

IMPACT STRATEGY  

As a social enterprise, Find A Nurse aims to maximize job creation, organize the informal home care sector in Lebanon and MENA, and become the region’s first and most reliable online marketplace for home care.

Our core impact lies in our model that has the potential to solve the problems of the informal home care industries in the developing world. We have simply made the process of finding, hiring and managing independent caregivers easier, smarter, more affordable and more reliable.

Find A Nurse achieves its mission by creating a well-structured, organized home care marketplace through setting clear, binding policies and agreements that protect clients against exploitation, punctuality and absenteeism issues and protects caregivers against abuse, wage-bargaining, late payments, burnout, unpaid overtime, improper working conditions, and harassment.

With the above mentioned, we are able to balance caregiver-client power dynamics and thus uplift caregivers' self-confidence via training them on life skills and communication skills. Our platform also enhances their access to flexible work in healthy working conditions especially to our vulnerable target segments (females from marginalized communities) that originally lacked proper access to professional employment opportunities. Our reputable brand alleviates the stereotypes associated with women working in "strangers' homes" and promotes safety via our policies, procedures and client-caregiver contracts.

With families, our impact is focused on “affordability” by promoting healthy competition for price and quality among caregivers, “safety” by showing public reviews and verified profiles that helps them make better informed decisions. In addition to “accessibility” by enhancing home care accessibility and extending it to remote areas and ultimately “elevating family well-being” by alleviating the risk of family-caregiver burnout.

We plan to to build an AI-powered, user-friendly tool that analyzes families' unique care needs and, using a smart-matching algorithm, determines the caregiver-client total compatibility score, shortlists the qualified healthcare professionals, then recommends the optimal caregiver based on a set of variables that include proximity, qualifications, ratings, gender preferences, and time availability. 

We will use this technology to build a unique SaaS product with a B2B2C model to convert our largest potential competitors into partners with aligned interests. This technology will benefit 3 groups of users: home care agencies, home care providers, and families.

• Families: We will be providing families with an easy-to-use online platform to help them book caregivers via a transparent system. However, these caregivers will not be freelancers; caregivers will rather be working under the local home care agencies, who will be our second group of users. In this model, families will now be empowered to make their own choices, when booking caregivers via our easy-to-use, online platform that offers a highly personalized, convenient and transparent experience.

• Home Care Agencies: We will be helping our member agencies boost their lead-generation and outreach efforts. By shifting the industry’s focus to highlight agencies’ individual caregivers, who are actually delivering the care, we will introduce an innovative way to boost these agencies’ marketing efforts, thus helping them decrease their customer acquisition cost. This will enhance our member agencies’ capacity to compete with the informal market and with other agencies. Our platform, being an unbiased third-party, will add much-needed credibility to agencies’ claims about their high quality services. Crowdsourcing reviews on agencies’ and caregivers’ services creates a transparent system that incentivizes agencies and caregivers to deliver the best service.
  
  In addition, by showcasing top performing caregivers’ via highlighting their experience and merits, we will substantially increase their caregivers’ satisfaction, thus improving agencies’ caregiver retention rates.
  
  Additionally, our software will provide agencies with a tool to streamline their internal day-to-day operations. The software will automate the time-consuming daily tasks including scheduling, accounting, payroll, HR management, collecting client feedback and many other aspects of service booking. This has the effect of boosting their scalability, and gives the agency the chance to focus on the most important part of running the business, like providing excellent customer service.
  
  In summary, our B2B2C model converts these agencies from competitors into partners with aligned interests. Our technology will help them cut their running costs, provide them with an enhanced online presence, and enable a superior customer experience which will boost their profitability.

• Caregivers:  our third group of users, our online platform will aim at addressing the chronic caregiver churn rate by enhancing their satisfaction, life-work balance and career-belonging. As part of our plan, every caregiver will get a professional profile that serves as a “LinkedIn” account that documents his/her progress. Families, employers and references can leave verified reviews and testimonials on these profiles, which will provide caregivers with an encouraging public recognition that rewards their good performance. These profiles will also facilitate moving among agencies and neighborhoods without having to go through the same recruitment process. In addition, we will be rolling out a caregiver portal to help them decide on their availability and geographic coverage. More importantly, we will give caregivers the ability to choose their own rates. Introducing such a performance-based compensation scheme will give a further incentive for caregivers to keep seeking excellence in care provision and customer experience. 

At our company, we have a diversity and inclusion policy that is shared with all employees to demonstrate our commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion at all levels of the company.

We communicate our company's goals for becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive through a variety of channels, including all-hands meetings, newsletters, and social media posts. We also have regular conversations with employees and stakeholders to gather feedback and ensure that our goals are aligned with the needs and values of the community.

To increase diversity and promote inclusion, we have implemented a range of initiatives, including targeted recruitment efforts, diversity and inclusion training for all employees, and onboarding of caregivers from underprivileged communities. We communicate these efforts through regular updates and progress reports, as well as by recognizing and celebrating the contributions of employees from diverse backgrounds.

We measure the success of our diversity and inclusion initiatives through a range of metrics, including employee engagement, retention rates of caregivers, and diversity of our platform. We have had great success in promoting diversity and inclusion through our initiatives, including seeing an increase in the number of underrepresented groups on our platform, higher employee engagement and satisfaction, and improved business outcomes. We share these success stories through our  social media channels and other communications platforms.

Our business model in Lebanon relies on B2C mainly and a new revenue stream of B2B model created by the new partnerships and staffing services provided to these partnerships (Ex. MSF, BaitCare..etc)

In our scale up plan, it will be based on sharing revenues with home care agencies (B2B2C) who set their fees per caregiver. We are planning to charge agencies 15-20% commission on every booking. Families pay us in advance and we pay agencies after the service is delivered. The price is mainly controlled by the agencies.

Our customer segments:

Customer type: paying clients, onboarded caregivers and donors. Customer segments:

Clients: 

I. Adults who need home health care and lack access to professional caregivers' contacts 

II. Family members of sick elderly or disabled that lack the capacity, time or skills to take care of them

III. Patients interested in at-home PCR tests and other lab tests

VI. First-time mothers seeking professional maternity nurse's help in the process of adjustment to their first childbirth experience both physically and psychologically.

V. Working mothers who need help in caring for their babies at home after their maternity leave. 

VI. Mothers of twins or other children who are too overwhelmed to take care of their newborns by themselves. 

Caregivers:

I. Nurses, Midwives and professional healthcare providers willing to work as freelancers or full-time in home care. 

II. Patient and elderly companions, nannies and babysitters willing to work as freelancers or full-time in home care.

Early adopters:

Tech-driven clients who seek online access and bookings.

Our unique value proposition:

For families:

I. Instant access to a large network of caregivers 

II. Verified, trained & reviewed caregivers

III. Hire your preferred caregiver 

IV. Browse, book & pay Online 

V. Cost reduction by healthy price competition 

For caregivers:

I. Protected financial Rights, flexible working schedules & good pay 

II. Easy, hassle-free, fraud-proof payment and Anti-Exploitation policies

III. Facilitated work-life balance

IV. Professional nurse image and reputable employer brand

V. Clear job description & realistic expectations and issue resolution 

We plan to build our technology so Find A Nurse will be the first market aggregator in MENA and North America,where home care agencies can enlist their caregivers on a digital platform in order to boost their online presence and increase their operations efficiency, which collectively increase their sales and decrease their running costs. By appealing to home care agencies, Find A Nurse set out to build the largest online marketplace of home care services, thus providing families an easy, personalized, and transparent tool to browse and book trusted home care providers with ease.

Since we launched our online platform in June 2018, we have onboarded 450+ caregivers on our platform, created up to 26 full time jobs and 4000 worked hours per month, and served 107,00+ hours to 650+ families. Our total sales have reached so far around 300,000 (fresh USD). 

With the economic crisis and currency devaluation in Lebanon since 2019 and until today, Find A Nurse has been running bootstrapping mode and relying on sweat-equity from its founders and grants from various NGOs.

We managed to break-even due to the fact that most of our costs are variable and that our team is small yet highly multi-functional. In addition, our sales have been purely relying on organic reach and word of mouth.

We have so far received financial and in-kind support from: Al Fanar Seed Programme,The Nawaya-unicef Impact Lab, UK Embassy in Lebanon, Injaz, Spark, Berytech, Acted, Jusoor, Mercy Corps, AltCity/Bloom, Changelabs, CESVI, and AUB. So far, we have raised around 100,000 USD in the form of grants.