America’s home care industry is facing a fundamental
economic problem: demand for care at home is growing rapidly, but the workforce
needed to deliver it is struggling to keep pace.
A recent report from Research and Markets puts the global
non-medical home care market at $8.7 billion in 2025 and projects it will reach
$18.7 billion by 2033. North America currently represents about 42% of the
market, according to the report, with demand being driven by an aging
population, rising chronic illness and a growing preference among older adults
to remain at home rather than enter institutional care.
The challenge is that market growth does not automatically
create the people needed to provide the service.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections underline the
scale of the workforce issue. Employment of home health and personal care aides
is projected to grow 17% between 2024 and 2034, from approximately 4.35 million
jobs to 5.09 million. The BLS projects roughly 765,800 openings annually over
the decade, including positions created by growth and jobs that must be filled
as workers leave the occupation.
That creates a potentially significant bottleneck for an
industry whose future depends on delivering more care outside hospitals and
residential facilities.
The question is increasingly becoming not simply how to
recruit more caregivers, but how to make better use of the workforce already
available.
That is the problem Roost is attempting to address.
The U.S. home care company, led by CEO Alex Moran (pictured),
has developed a model combining regulated home care with artificial
intelligence designed to improve several stages of the caregiving process. The
technology (Affinity AI, Temporal AI and
Horizon AI) is intended to help identify and recruit appropriate caregivers,
support onboarding, match caregivers with clients and provide families with
better information about how their loved ones are doing at home.
The objective is not to replace the caregiver with
technology, but to use technology to make the human caregiver more effectively
matched to the person receiving care.
That distinction could become increasingly important as the
economics of home care change. The BLS identifies home health and personal care
aides as the occupation projected to add the largest number of jobs in the U.S.
economy between 2024 and 2034, reflecting the growing demand for hands-on care.
Roost has now begun operations in Cleveland, Ohio, which the
company describes as its first U.S. market, with plans to expand gradually into
other parts of the country.
For an industry confronting rising demand and workforce
constraints simultaneously, the emerging question is whether better technology
can help make human caregiving more scalable.
Roost is betting that it can.
Article By John Walsh
