CareLinx's New Model for Home Health Care

While Dietra Prater Slack was recovering from oral surgery last month, she needed someone to take care of her 86-year-old mother, who lives 25 miles away and is housebound. The home-care agencies she called wanted at least $300 a day to dispatch a nonmedical health aide to her mother’s home—more than she could afford. Desperate, Prater Slack, a paralegal instructor, searched online. She found a certified nursing assistant willing to do a 24-hour shift for $150 through CareLinx, which works like a matchmaking site for families and nonmedical caregivers. “[CareLinx] has all the tools in place that you need in order to do this well,” says Prater Slack. “And it’s at a reasonable cost for working Americans.”

Launched in December by a onetime Merrill Lynch derivatives trader, San Francisco-based CareLinx maintains a database of 5,500 home-care workers. Visitors to the site can search the listings based on criteria such as work experience and overnight availability or post a job for free. They pay about $50 a month to connect to caregivers who they’d like to interview. Once matched, CareLinx runs a national criminal background check on the candidate. While clients negotiate wages directly with hires, they can elect to use CareLinx’s payment system so that caregivers are covered under the startup’s liability insurance policy.