Yijia Launches SCL Home-Based Care Collaboration Network to Enable High-Quality, Scalable Replication in Elderly Care

As a “top performer” in the home-based health and elderly care sector, Yijia (Shanghai) Medical and Elderly Care Services Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Yijia”) has recently announced new developments.

On April 28, Yijia held the “In-Depth Insights Sharing Session on the Home-Based Health and Elderly Care Industry” and the First Yijia “Smart Care for the Future – Gathering Wisdom to Embrace Change” Product and Technology Launch Event in Shanghai.

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At the conference, Yijia made a landmark launch of its innovative elderly care model—the “SCL (Servicer Cooperation Links) Home-Based Elderly Care Service Collaboration Network”—developed from a decade of hands-on experience in operating and delivering home-based medical and elderly care services.

As is well known, Yijia represents the highest standard for home-based health and elderly care services in China. It is not only the sole care institution in China accredited under the JCI international standards, having successfully passed its JCI re-accreditation in 2021, but also the only long-term care insurance service provider in Shanghai to have consecutively retained its “Five-Star” rating.

Through the SCL open platform, Yijia can share and replicate its standardized digital health and elderly care service system across the entire industry, enabling service providers joining SCL to achieve scalable delivery of high-quality services while fostering collaborative synergy.

This means that, starting with SCL, the high-quality home-based health and elderly care services built by Yijia are poised to establish a foundational service framework for the entire home-based care sector, accelerating the standardization and normalization of a market currently characterized by fragmentation, dispersion, and disorder.

The key to the birth of SCL can be summarized as a stable “pyramid” triangular model: at the top is Yijia’s original aspiration to “provide health care for every Chinese family,” while the two cornerstones are Yijia’s health and elderly care operation model and its technology-driven health and elderly care products.

Founded Yijia in 2013 and deeply cultivated the industry for 10 years, Wang Zhentao used eight words to evaluate the current domestic home-based health and elderly care market: vibrant yet chaotic.

“This industry boasts substantial scale and rapid growth, yet the experience for both practitioners and consumers is poor, even to the point of being rife with chaos.”

It is precisely this “chaos” that has further ignited Wang Zhentao’s original aspiration:Healthcare for Every Chinese HouseholdHe hopes to provide more elderly people with services that are warm, dignified, and respectful.

Guided by this original aspiration, Wang Zhentao regards standardization, normalization, and digitalization as the key to steering the health and wellness industry from an era of chaos into one of stability. Missing this opportunity would mean more than just setting the industry back by a decade of detours.

“The services provided by the health and wellness industry have a crucial impact on the physical health and quality of life of the elderly. Time waits for no one; any lost time may come at the cost of the quality of life and well-being of generations of older adults.”

Regarding how to achieve industry standardization, normalization, and digitalization, Wang Zhentao believes that a role akin to an “industry middle platform” is needed to connect the entire sector and help practitioners establish a unified, standardized service system. He vividly refers to this role as the “palanquin bearer.”

“No single enterprise can solve all the industry’s challenges; the health and wellness sector requires symbiosis and collaboration to foster sound development toward standardization, regulation, and digitalization.”

Guided by its original mission to “Safeguard the Health of Every Chinese Family,” Dr. Jiang Yichen, Co-founder of Yijia, shared the health and wellness operational model that Yijia has refined over the past decade.

“Scaling offline operations from 0 to 1, from 1 to 100, and from 100 to N is extremely challenging; very few companies truly succeed in navigating this journey.”

Over the past decade, Yijia has successfully navigated various milestones in corporate development and achieved chain-scale operations. Currently, Yijia operates more than 100 healthcare and nursing facilities across 40 cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Tianjin, delivering approximately 8 million home-based nursing services annually. Furthermore, Yijia’s revenue this year has increased by 80% year-on-year compared to last year, nearing the RMB 1 billion mark.

These achievements are primarily attributable to the refinement of service delivery. Dr. Jiang Yichen believes that, in the realm of health and wellness services, an emphasis on “standardization” can never be excessive. Guided by this philosophy, she underscores that the core of supply chain transformation in the service industry lies in the transformation of service providers.

“We believe that excellence in quality leads to success, and we are committed to going above and beyond to serve our customers’ essential needs.”

To deliver high-quality, convenient services, Yijia has designed a comprehensive operational activity map centered on customers, with integrated service solutions, differentiated strategies, and OMO-driven enhancements to experience and service effectiveness as its core pillars, ensuring the consistent delivery of high-quality team services.

Secondly, the greatest challenge in chain replication lies in achieving scalable replication of high-quality services. Through years of practice, Yijia has developed a comprehensive chain replication model, including phased implementation, OKR management and empowerment, “textbook-style” SOD-BP, and the Seven-Step Empowerment Method.

Precisely because of its deep understanding of the various detours and pain points encountered by offline enterprises at different stages of development, Yijia has refined and distilled its own honed technologies, products, and management capabilities into an operational management model, which it shares with the industry through SCL.

“Only when our peers thrive can the industry flourish.” Dr. Jiang Yichen hopes that the health and wellness operational model refined by Yijia will help the industry avoid detours, allowing it to devote more resources to providing higher-quality health and wellness services for users, thereby accelerating progress toward the goals of standardization, regulation, and personalization.

In addition, Dr. Wu Danxing, a renowned industry expert and member of the Expert Committee on Elderly Care Services under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, regards Yijia’s press conference as a milestone moment for China’s home-based health and wellness industry.

“We have neither a Steve Jobs nor a Ren Zhengfei. However, the future of China’s health and elderly care industry requires the innovative spirit of Jobs and the corporate sense of mission embodied by Ren Zhengfei. As the first health and elderly care company to hold a press conference, Yijia has presented a stable, triangular team structure and a comprehensive ‘battle plan.’ This represents the future direction of China’s health and elderly care sector and constitutes its core competitiveness.”

It is precisely for this reason that at this press conference, Yijia prominently launched the SCL Home-based Health and Elderly Care Service Collaboration Network, aiming to leverage this platform to open up its refined health and elderly care service and management operation systems developed over many years.

Specifically, among themIt encompasses Yijia’s two core digital technologies: the intelligent health and elderly care service system, Aizai Carelink+, and the AI-powered home care supervision platform, AHC.

Traditional health and wellness services primarily rely on the individual cognition and technical proficiency of front-line service providers, making it difficult to achieve efficient, standardized service delivery and large-scale replication under this model.Through the Aizai Carelink+ system, service personnel can collect user data more quickly and comprehensively. Once entered into the system, rehabilitation plans can be intelligently generated, ultimately enabling the large-scale production and replication of high-quality services.

AHC represents YiJia’s first independent development and establishment of a digital supervision platform that integrates 5G and AI with traditional health and elderly care services, marking an industry-first achievement. After long-term application, the platform has now achieved mature and successful operation.Primarily addressing challenges such as difficulties in supervising service processes and the lack of effective regulatory measures in home-based medical and elderly care services, this solution is based on JCI standardized specifications for home-based medical and elderly care. It integrates functions including facial recognition, voiceprint recognition, and data storage and analysis.Real-time control of every step in the service process.

“We have integrated these two technologies to create an open platform—the Servicer Cooperation Links Home Health and Elderly Care Service Provider Collaboration Network, a network of health and elderly care service providers sharing the same technical, product, and delivery standards.”

Liu Heng, Head of Innovative Businesses at Yijia, introduced that on this platform, Yijia exports its management, operational, and product systems to partners through either technology empowerment or licensed operations.

By the end of 2022, the SCL collaborative network had been implemented in 23 cities, demonstrating Yijia’s capability to replicate and deploy its digital health and elderly care system across different urban markets. This year, Yijia aims to further expand its network by partnering with 100 additional cities.