CareAcademy

Providing online professional development to teach and upskill caregivers and prepare for the future of healthcare.

Over 2 Million caregivers seek ways to professionalize, earn more through caring, and create opportunities to grow within their careers. Current models of education do not easily scale or are not easily accessible by a wide swath of caregivers that may have to work to support families and care for current clients. Home care is the fastest health market.

With a 70% turnover rate within home care, caregivers leave the profession due to low pay or limited upward mobility in job responsibility. The clients of caregivers also 'age out' of the expertise of caregivers.

CareAcademy's online stackable Certification aims to provide caregivers with a flexible way to continue their education with just in time learning. Caregivers have the opportunity to keep learning over time for the needs of their clients and can eventually earn an HHA or CNA certification, and through our partnership with such institutions as College for America (Southern New Hampshire University), a low cost nursing degree or healthcare associates degree.

Thus, we're leveraging our relationship with employers to incentivize caregiver learning and upskilling, and connecting caregivers with the ability to help learn through on the job training online.

Caregivers rather than months spend 15 minutes a day in classes.

Work as a HHA or CNA becomes a vital stepping stone to realizing the completion of a degree in many cases that they may have started and not have had the opportunity to complete it and go on to promising health work.

Our classes are more responsive to the soft skills or bedside skills as well as the emotional needs of caregivers. Often caregivers without computers are left out of learning opportunities.
We're creating an industry standard of flexible education that becomes a way to pursue continuing education. We believe that there is such a greater need to find more caregivers and allied health workers that by placing education directly in the hands of caregivers to learn on their own time. CareAcademy completed a survey of over 700 caregivers that indicated 52% (397) said they are considering getting more education.

Our online classes are powered by mobile phones that are accessible via an app that can be used on any smartphone. We have found that 70% of caregivers access us via mobile phones for 24 minutes a day to learn and re-learn key skills for working. Caregivers practice those skills and report back those skills to our platform. Education can be positioned and accounted for in credentialing the caregivers skills.

Caregivers take a test which is reported back to the employer, via an employer dashboard. Our platform allows for a 60% reduction in the time to train a caregiver.

We use the following KPIs and also PRI Goals as an impact based company:
1. MRR: $20,000
2. Caregivers trained: 20,000
3. Caregivers Upskilled: 10,151

Our goals are to double the number of caregivers reached, develop the HHA model and complete piloting wihing Massachusetts to prove scale.

We hope to train the home care and healthcare workforce, pulling in federal, state, and private companies to recognize a common language of care credentialing, allowing individuals to enter the healthcare field without college debt, while learning in their current work. The vision of transforming a caregiver a nurse via short bursts of stackable classes over time is a novel approach. However, the market for home care will include 80 million adults in 20 years that will need the services of health workers and thus the magnitude of the issue warrants the boldness of our vision.

Many caregivers teeter are part of the working poor. They are the underestimated because they are often kept out because of their language, their income, age and familiarity with technology, and many times their legal and immigration status. CareAcademy seeks to educate caregivers and not allow language, income, or status to be a barrier. We provide not only language based training but language supports. By attaining more education and credentialing these workers increase their economic growth via their employers. Caregivers no matter their background earn more marketable skills and can upskill.

We know to address scale and affordability we must work with employers who are seeking the workers. Here are our metrics for caregivers and employers.

Caregivers:
95 NPS Score among caregivers.
20,000 caregivers on the platfrom and growth by 1000 a month
We have increased class engagement from 15 minutes to 24 minutes
92% completion rate, 60% higher than industry standards.

Employers:
80 NPS score among agencies.
We have decreased turnover by 74% for agencies starting with HouseWorks.
60% reduction in training and onboarding time
Over $1m in contracted revenue from agencies.

Helen Adeosun a former teacher, caregiver, and Home Health Aide faced many of the challenges that caregivers often face. She faced low-paying work and very little support from her employer. More importantly she wanted to see transfer of that education to help her get greater skills. Helen still leads the company and added our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Madhuri Reddy. Dr. Reddy saw how ill prepared and paid that caregivers as frontline health workers were for the needs the clients. Together they believe that they can help direct care frontline workers find longevity in direct care and healthcare work.

We're digitally built for scale because our online classes can scale to thousands of students, and we offer peer supports among caregivers. In two years, we have done this with 20,000 caregivers and 250,000 in our pipeline.
Financial sustainability comes from our existing partnerships with our home care agency customers, because we believe that like all professional education, employers stand to benefit and should invest in their workers. As caregivers upskill, they do so in coordination with our customers/their employers and that means they have access to opportunities.

We would use Solve's support towards creating content for our target languages for the fastest growing immigrant communities including Cantonese and Spanish speaking communities. We are working with partners such as Ameerican Red Cross and would use the funding to deploy pilots in 10-15 states for our upskilling opportunities such as HHA and CNA. We would be able to reach 10,000 additional caregivers in our training. We would bring in 2 caregiving managers to act as career councilors for caregiver graduates to accelerate their upskilling on our platform.

- Funding: CareAcademy has raised 2.2M and will be cashflow positive by Q1 of next year.
- Regulations changing: We have aligned ourselves in each state with as many of leaders of home care aide councils, and other organizations so we may leverage partners and lobby to anticipate regulatory challenges.
The largest external risk is the length of time and or hurdles associated with becoming a proprietary credit bearing school. We're learning from schools in other contexts and industries and other compliance experts. We've also reached out to schools that may lend us their credentialing status to ease risk.