From booking home carers to physio sessions, WeMa Life is an online marketplace and app that brings together health and care providers with individuals seeking a wide range of services. The multi-service HealthTech platform offers benefits to both consumers and businesses. For people seeking health, care and wellbeing services – either for themselves or someone close to them – WeMa Life makes it easy to source, book and pay reputable providers.
Services include: social care, domiciliary care, nursing, domestic help, personal care and hygiene, massages, yoga and Pilates instructors, nutritionists, physiotherapists, personal trainers and more. Users can book one-off and on-going sessions, as well as services from multiple providers in one transaction. Meanwhile, the tools available through the online portal and app also enable businesses to improve the management and delivery of their services.
Here, Rohit Patni – one of the three family co-founders of the app – talks to Care & Nursing about how WeMa Life came to being and how it can help make life easier for both users and service providers.
What gave you the idea for the app?
As three co-founders, we all came from quite different backgrounds. Prior to the creation of WeMa Life in 2017, I was working in IT and had recently sold my company YESPay to WorldPay for more than £20million. My wife, Rajal, was helping a range of businesses grow through implementing operational and strategic plans; while my son, Vivek, was working in professional services after completing his degree in Biomedical Sciences.
And then the idea for WeMa Life – or rather, the dramatic need for a solution of this nature – became apparent to all of us. After experiencing first-hand how slow and complicated it was to find and book reputable healthcare services for an unwell elderly relative, we were inspired to develop a way of making the process simpler with more choice for consumers.
Drawing on our collective talents, we started work on making WeMa Life a reality – self-funding the company through the development stage, before proudly launching the app and online marketplace in February this year.
How did you choose which service providers to include on the app?
Before permitting any service provider onto WeMa Life, our team performs rigorous due diligence to ensure only reputable providers are listed. Away from developing the tech, a major focus leading up to the launch of the solution was to get as many health, care and wellbeing businesses accessible through the platform, and this remains a key objective. From nursing to nutritionists, WeMa Life is continuing to expand the services available – with many more expected to join after the app’s launch. But quality will always supersede quantity, and diligent checks remains essential before we on-board a new provider.
Which services would be useful to the elderly?
With WeMa Live being borne out of our family’s own experiences of looking after an elderly relative, one of the major elements we wanted to address in the design of the online platform and app was to make the process of sourcing, booking and paying reputable providers easier for older generations in mind.
As WeMa Life has grown so has the services available. The app now includes a range of services: social care, domiciliary care, nursing, domestic help, personal care and hygiene, massages and more. Each of these could prove useful for an elderly person, depending on their specific situation.
Importantly, through WeMa Life family members and friends can also book services on behalf of an older person – this is a real benefit for informal carers responsible for looking after a grandparent or neighbour, for example.
If someone needed care in an emergency, would they be able to book immediately?
WeMa Life doesn’t replace the need for acute medical services in cases of emergency – it is certainly not a replacement to ambulances or A&E. But by organising carers to help in people’s everyday life, it does make an emergency less likely to happen. Indeed, we like to stress how WeMa Life empowers people by putting them in control of their own health or a loved one’s’ wellbeing, scheduling support as and when they need it.
Services and appointments can be arranged at short notice, of course, but for medical emergencies people should naturally call 999 or contact the appropriate services.
Where do you see WeMa going in the future?
As WeMa Life has offices in London and India, the immediate future will see the company focus on becoming more prevalent in both countries, with the possibility to expand into other potential markets.
Just as we have seen through the rise of FinTech and PropTech, it seems certain that the global HealthTech market is going to increase in size dramatically over the coming months and years. In turn, it means that the number of consumers and businesses embracing tech in the health and care space is likely to explode – at WeMa Life we look forward to being at the forefront of this digital revolution, using tech to make people’s lives a lot easier.
