Building an MVP for a healthtech startup tackling community care logistics

Project Challenge

Planning community care visits is operationally demanding. Teams such as district nurses need to visit multiple patients in their homes each day, with each visit shaped by location, timing, patient condition and the practitioner’s capabilities. Manual scheduling in this context is time-consuming and difficult to optimise.

Root Care needed a product that could reflect the realities of community healthcare rather than treating appointments as isolated bookings. The platform had to support the coordination of multiple home visits across a practitioner’s day, while considering both clinical fit and practical travel requirements.

• The challenge included several overlapping factors:
• Patients had differing care needs, including chronic condition support, elderly care and post-discharge recovery.
• Practitioners had different skills and specialisms, such as dementia care or diabetes support, which affected who could appropriately take each appointment.
• Home visits needed to be sequenced in a way that reduced unnecessary travel and made daily rounds practical to deliver.
• The product needed to move beyond a simple scheduling tool and act as a logistics aid for mobile healthcare teams.
• As an early-stage startup, Root Care needed an MVP that was focused, credible and useful for demonstrating the proposition to prospective trial partners.

There was also a clear comparator in the market. Products such as DocAbode already addressed aspects of workforce scheduling in healthcare, so Root Care needed its proposition to show a meaningful distinction through the combination of appointment automation and explicit route planning for sequential community visits.