Eleanor Yap
Imagine this scenario – a caregiver is looking after his father who has dementia and wants to get him to a day care centre twice a week to keep him active and not always at home. However, a barrier for his father getting to this centre is transport as his father is in a wheelchair and family members are not able to bring him there.
Besides the family trying to search online for the various day care centres where they live and call them or visit them to find the right fit, they can now get all this legwork done by a company and for free.
Shared Tong Duong, CEO of new startup Wellderly, “Seniors and their caregivers have a hard time navigating the care space, meaning they don’t know where to find information or what is available, and they also need to repeat their story every time with the different service providers.”
He further highlighted another big problem in the eldercare space – care fragmentation. “Organisations including private service providers keep data in silos and not much information is exchanged between the service providers. This would impact the seniors and their caregivers. This is a prominent problem and am surprised no one has solved this including in countries like the US,” added Tong, who is also a co-founder of Homage, a private services provider.
Hence, Wellderly was born, and is one of many ideas by Dr Tan Jit Seng, founder and director of Lotus Eldercare, which provides home medical services to home or bed-bound patients. According to Tong, they have no competitors here in Singapore as yet and that some voluntary welfare organisations handle such coordination services internally.
So how does Wellderly work? Family members who contact the company will be assigned a care coordinator, mainly a medical social worker, as the family’s primary point of contact. Similarly, to how a social worker’s role is in a hospital, at Wellderly, he or she does much more. For instance, if the family need home care services, the coordinator will collect all the information and find the best option for the family and present it to them. Once a decision has been made by the family, the coordinator will arrange everything seamlessly with the service provider, or providers in case there is a need for additional services like transport if the senior is on a wheelchair like the scenario mentioned earlier.
Other care services that are provided including finding a foreign domestic helper, homecare services, food delivery, caregiver training, caregiver support, equipment, transport services, escorting services, applying for schemes or claims, and legal help including Wills and Lasting Power of Attorney.
Since the service is provided free to the customer, it is the service provider that will foot a certain amount depending on the services provided. Explained Tong, “We are technically giving them business. As the service providers will have to run marketing campaigns in order to attract customers, working with Wellderly actually helps them to get more business without the need of doing marketing themselves. They only pay Wellderly for the service delivered to customers, so Wellderly’s fee is actually a cost of revenue with guaranteed ROI versus a marketing expense with no guaranteed ROI when they self-run their marketing.” He assured that customers will not end up paying extra but only the normal fee to the service providers.
Currently, Wellderly, a recent Leap for Good (by the Singapore Centre for Social Enterprise (raiSE)) winner, has several customers and are also working out the financial arrangements with the service providers. They are also expanding their list of partners which already include HoviCare, Lotus Eldercare, Locumsg and other service providers. Tong shared that for now, they will focus on eldercare but will look into the caring of children with various conditions in the future.
“We strongly believe that if care is coordinated well, seniors will have less re-admission to the hospitals. It will also change the caregivers’ experiences and make them more positive. When you are tasked to take care of a loved one, you are expected to be an expert in eldercare and you usually are not. We at Wellderly are all experienced in eldercare, so why not we help,” said Tong.
