Chenny Xia knew what she was up against when she and her co-founders launched Gotcare in 2018.
Chenny Xia knew what she was up against when she and her co-founders launched Gotcare in 2018.
She’d seen how a system built around administrative and institutional structures continuously failed the patients it was meant to help.
She’d seen the desperation patients and families felt as they navigated this fragmented system.
She’d seen the burnout families and care workers alike experienced within a system with no room for flexibility or individual choice.
She’d seen the disempowerment and disconnection take hold of people during their most vulnerable moments.
And she’d seen the impossible life-or-death decisions that many Canadians found themselves contemplating after years of struggling to find care that met their needs.
This is what happens when a system treats caregiving as a transactional service rather than a relationship.
And changing a deeply established system, even when its shortcomings are widely recognized, is extraordinarily difficult.
“Before Gotcare, Carol and I consulted with an innovation team that was specifically tasked with rethinking how home care can be deployed…it basically went nowhere because the weight of the status quo is really heavy. You can’t just add innovation and stir. They literally needed to start up a new operations team, a new intake team, and they just weren’t prepared to take on that investment.”
Indeed, she knew the nearly impossible mountain Gotcare would need to scale, and went for it anyway.
The solution? Don’t scale the mountain, flip it upside down.
“We essentially live in this very sick care system… often, patients feel like they are reporting to healthcare providers, as opposed to feeling served by them. Home care is a longitudinal healthcare relationship and the ‘relationship’ part is often missing.”
But having a viable solution that made economic sense, enabled better patient care, and attracted workers in a high-turnover industry didn’t translate into a smooth growth trajectory for Chenny and the Gotcare team.
The mountain did not want to yield.
So, the Gotcare team began by building the case for a new person-directed model of care. They took on some of the hardest-to-serve cases – people living in rural communities with complex needs – and harnessed their technology to find care workers for those who slipped through the cracks.
The success stories began piling up.
“After months and years of coming up short on complex solutions for a loved one with extremely complex needs, Gotcare has been a literal godsend…”
“Within an hour of being discharged from the hospital, I had a nurse call me and a PSW at my door… I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”
As positive feedback grew and Gotcare’s care provider network expanded, the team continued building a business case that would appeal to insurers, governments, and investors.
Early on, they decided they weren’t going to contort their investment pitch to fit traditional venture capitalists’ expectations.
“We weren’t going to fit our pitch to a VC who wanted a 10x or 100x return. Instead, it was very much ‘hey, this is what we stand for, here’s the change that we are making in your own backyard, and we need capital to expand our impact. How do we do that?’ That’s when we got introduced to family offices and impact funds.”
One of those introductions brought Chenny and Gotcare into the Coralus community, and just like that, the company secured its first investment outside of family and friends.
Coralus’s financial support enabled Gotcare to expand its services to BC and Alberta, but the non-monetary support proved just as integral as they navigated the seismic internal shifts that came with expansion.
“We had to go from just making things happen and improvising to being compliance-driven and having very specific service level agreements. That’s a massive cultural shift for a team…We also went through a fair amount of people; we called it our era of stabilization. MJ (a Coralus mentor) was really great for that, because she was able to help us work through the cultural pieces that need to shift… that was huge for us.”
As Gotcare continued to gain traction, Chenny found herself precariously close to burnout, an irony far too many healthcare workers can relate to.
“It was MJ who helped me connect the personal journey of healing and the professional path forward… Once that connection was made, the two were just not separable from me anymore.”
Chenny also credits the Coralus ecosystem with shifting how she shows up as a CEO, encouraging her to own her story rather than shaping it to fit outside expectations. And the community’s influence has extended to the leadership team across the company.
“We find ourselves asking questions like ‘how do we orient towards growth in a way that makes sense for us?’”
As Gotcare marks its eighth year in business, tectonic shifts are on the horizon. Most notably, the company is entering a multi-year contract with the Province of Nova Scotia to support a new individualized funding model that’s designed to give people and families greater control over how their supports are arranged.
And they’re ready for it. In fact, that readiness – the ability to respond when structural, policy, or external pressures create an opening for change – has been integral to Gotcare’s growth.
“It’s not like systems naturally want to shift. It’s not that they’re saying ‘oh, yes, we want to change how we do things’. That is not the vibe at all. Rather, we’re watching where the fissures are, where the acupuncture points are and coming in at those moments ready to go. It’s the identification of where those pressure points are as well as the readiness to meet them; that’s the big challenge and the big opportunity.”
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