If you're involved at all in organizing the home care of a person who's recuperating from an injury or serious illness, is elderly and ailing, or for some other reason requires frequent visits from nurses or therapists, keep an eye on Enurgi, a health-care marketplace that just launched.
Patients and clients can manage their caregivers.
You can find caregivers on the site, book them for home care, rate their job performance, and manage their payment via Paypal. The service helps you keep a calendar so you can easily tell who's coming over and when, and quickly fill in gaps you may have in your coverage.
Unlike many other service directories, Enurgi starts with a fairly complete database of providers. The registration records for nurses certified to deliver home care are public and recorded at the state level, and the company has incorporated all 50 states' data into its catalog of providers. Practitioners do have to "claim" their entry, though, before they can connect with patients and collect payments.
The service is free right now, but in 2008, the company will take a percentage of revenues paid to service providers: 6 or 7 percent, founder Chiara Bell told me. Bell compares this to the much larger percentage skimmed by traditional agencies who connect caregivers and patients. Bell also points out that with Enurgi, patients can pick their caregivers and select the best blend of skills for their situation, instead of just taking the first match proposed by the agency. Likewise, caregivers can be more selective about accepting gigs that fit their commuting and work preferences.
Caregivers get their own interface, to manage schedules and clients.
Enurgi is a smart business not just because the data to build it is available, and not just because the fees that the company will charge are substantial yet still undercut the established middlemen in this market. It's also smart because sales efforts for the service can be highly leveraged: If Bell can get some hospitals, corporate HR departments, or associations centered on particular ailments (such as dementia) onboard, she'll easily be able to generate revenue, probably enough to turn a profit.
Future plans for the site include management of insurance billing, paying employment taxes, and keeping track of flexible spending account data.
Related: We're previously looked at CareSquare, which does the same thing, but for childcare. It's a theoretically useful service but much harder to make into a business since there's no database of providers and no powerful organizations supporting them. See also: Care.com, Gonannies.com, and Sittercity.com.
If I hear about one more highly focused social networking site, I'm going to explode. Or failing that, write a blog post. Every day, Webware gets pitched on at least one, and sometimes several, new social nets designed for particular demographics: Barack Obama supporters, lesbians, you name it. The new metasocial network service Ning is leveraging this trend by making it possible for anyone to start a network, just as easily as anyone can now launch their own blog.
People with traditional publishing backgrounds are looking at this trend and thinking that social networks could become the new special-interest media properties. itLinkz, for example, is attempting to build a network of social networking sites based around communities that could use better representation online, and that have existing advertisers looking for their audiences.
The new face of special-interesting magazines?
(Credit: CNET Networks)This is the same logic that led the rise of special-interest magazines like Car and Driver, Running, and Popular Electronics in the 1950s.
In the case of itLinkz, the first site is NurseLinkup. It's aiming for an audience right in the company's sweet spot: Large, but not too large, and with a network of advertisers who'd love to reach them. And unlike Ning, itLinkz is not handing the keys to its networks over to the community entirely. The company has hired writers and editors to fill out its sites with content for the audience. It's like About.com plus social networking.
itLinkz is also putting effort into marketing its sites. It's not just going to throw them to the wild and hope for the best.
Next up from itLinkz: GolferLinkup. After that, COO Mike Ragan wouldn't tell me, but he was proud to say that the company has registered thousands of "linkup" domains.
The CEO of FindNearby (recently covered) has similar aspirations, and like itLinkz, his company has advisers from old-school publishing.
Will magazine publishers eventually become social network operators, or at least partner with the companies gunning for their readers? It makes some sense. And it would be good to see some business thinking applied to this movement, instead of the current reliance on Google advertising to support all these new networks.
- prev
- 1
- next
