A Care-Gap Map Opens the Door to Visit Coordination Services

Supply gaps across 59 areas

On October 13, 2026, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (보건복지부), Korea’s national health and social welfare ministry, released its first survey of community integrated care across all 229 cities, counties, and districts. The survey compared demand and supply for 16 major services, including home medical visits, home-care medical centers, short-term care, and home-help care, using the same criteria.

It identified 59 areas where demand for care was high but the local supply base was weak. That is roughly one in four cities, counties, and districts nationwide, and 40 of the 59 are designated population-decline areas. This does not mean all services are absent in those 59 areas. It means supply conditions are weak relative to local need.

The gap varied widely by service. In the Ministry of Health and Welfare survey, supply relative to demand was 96.9% for home-help care, but 1.5% for short-term care, 7.0% for the emergency care support programme, and 17.7% for home-care medical centers. These figures are not user-satisfaction or service-quality scores. They are a guide to where supply should be expanded.

Visit-based healthcare was particularly weak in population-decline areas. Supply relative to demand for home medical visits was 25.5% in general areas and 10.7% in population-decline areas. For home-care medical centers, the figures were 20.6% and 8.3%, respectively. The average travel distance to a provider under the Primary Care Physician Programme for People with Disabilities (장애인건강주치의) was also nearly twice as long in population-decline areas: 20.8 km, compared with 10.9 km elsewhere.

From nationwide implementation on March 27, 2026 through August 31, 93,136 people applied for integrated care and 78,677 were connected to services. The important point is that each person received an average of 3.5 service connections. This is no longer a matter of finding one organisation once. Connecting medical care, long-term care, meals, transport, and other support has already become routine work.

Care breaks down between calls and paperwork

Consider a daughter who works in Seoul while caring for her 82-year-old mother, who lives in a county in South Jeolla Province. When her mother leaves hospital, the daughter must read the discharge paperwork, look for county service information, and call providers that offer home medical visits and care services separately. She may need to repeat her mother’s condition, address, and required dates to each organisation.

The hospital knows about the discharge. The county office knows local support programmes. The home-help care provider knows which care workers have time available. But if this information does not connect in one place, the daughter becomes the messenger. She copies organisation names from paper guidance into her phone, then writes down waiting-list information from calls in a notes app or family chat.

The problem grows when there is a sudden gap rather than a planned schedule. If a care worker takes time off or the daughter cannot travel down, the family must find short-term or emergency care again. If they cannot tell which providers visit which areas or have capacity now, even a directory still leads to another round of calls.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s local-government service directory is a starting point for finding available services and organisations by area. The next step is to go beyond checking a provider name in a list: show who is reviewing a request and when a visit can happen. If a connection does not happen, the reason should also be recorded so it can inform future supply planning.

With a coordination service, the daughter enters her mother’s basic information and required support once. A case manager sends requests for home medical visits, meal support, and home-help care to suitable organisations. Providers reply with acceptance status and the first available visit date. Instead of copying call notes, the daughter sees request, acceptance, scheduled visit, and completion status on one screen.

Sudden gaps can be handled in the same place. A user can enter the help needed by tonight, travel distance, and the date a family caregiver will return, and the service can mark it as an urgent request rather than mixing it with long-term services. Local coordinators can group repeatedly rejected requests to distinguish a shortage of short-term care places from a lack of visiting staff or a travel-distance problem.

Much still requires people. Clinical judgment, checking the level of care needed, confirming an older person’s wishes, and building enough trust for them to accept an unfamiliar visitor cannot be replaced by a screen. The service should not remove people. It should reduce the time people spend copying the same information and waiting for answers.

How other countries have built coordination

In the United States, Findhelp lets hospitals, insurers, and local support organisations search for food, housing, transport, and care services, then check referral outcomes. Individuals and nonprofit providers can use basic search and registration for free, while hospitals, insurers, and government agencies pay local-area fees. Its focus is not only the organisation directory, but also recording a provider’s response and whether support was actually delivered.

In a case where the US insurer Superior HealthPlan used Findhelp to support pregnant people and families, electronic referrals and outcome responses increased substantially. However, the growth rates are figures published in a Findhelp customer case study and need separate verification. The useful point is that results were recorded separately as requests, responses, and actual support—not as search volume alone.

In the United Kingdom, Birdie lets home-care organisations manage shift assignments, care plans, visit records, and alerts in one place. The organisation, rather than the family receiving care, pays the fee, and the monthly price changes with scheduled care hours. It starts with a different problem: broken handoffs between scheduling and field records inside a provider organisation, rather than service discovery.

In a case study published by Birdie about Visiting Angels West Leicestershire, time spent preparing each care plan fell by about two hours and alert-response time also shortened. The organisation received the highest rating from the UK care regulator, but that rating does not prove an effect from Birdie alone. Still, its operating model—linking staff assignment and visit outcomes in one flow—is useful to examine.

Australia’s My Aged Care is a government-operated common entry point for aged care. Older people and families can apply for an assessment, find local providers, and receive help from a Care Finder worker if they cannot navigate the system on their own. There is no separate platform fee for searching and getting connected; the cost of actual care varies by support eligibility and service.

In 2024–2025, My Aged Care received more than 2.17 million calls and its website had more than 6.94 million visits. Care Finder took on more than 22,800 new cases and completed 151,063 service and support connections. At the same time, website satisfaction was 64.1%, showing that a large directory and intake point alone do not resolve every difficulty in navigating a complex system.

Four things you could build now

1. A local care-gap dashboard

This is a service for an integrated-care officer at a county office in a population-decline area. It gathers request counts, acceptances, waiting days, and rejection reasons by service type. Now that official figures reveal regional supply differences, support priorities can be set by requests that did not result in a connection rather than by the number of organisations alone. The first screen shows a local map alongside waiting requests and available places this week for home medical visits, short-term care, and emergency care.

2. A post-discharge care planner for families

This is a service for an adult child living far away to request and share home medical visits, prescription pickup, meal support, and care-worker visits after a parent leaves hospital. When each person receives an average of 3.5 connections, simply bringing together messages and call records from separate organisations can be useful. The first screen shows today’s visitors, requests that have not received a response, and actions the family must take, in time order.

3. A shared request inbox for local providers

This is a service for hospitals, home-care medical centers, and home-help care providers contracted by a county office. They receive requests and respond with acceptance status and a first visit date. Korea can now identify areas with insufficient supply; the next step is recording the stage where a request stops. The first screen has four panels: new requests, requests past their response deadline, accepted requests, and completed services.

4. A connector for idle time among visiting staff

This is a service for organisations that manage the open time, service areas, and estimated travel time of visiting nurses and care workers across a wide area. Population-decline areas face long travel distances to organisations and high travel burdens for visiting staff. Before establishing another organisation, operators could try grouping scattered available time. The first screen displays today’s route, unallocated time, and nearby waiting requests together.

Why this matters where you are

Korea’s survey makes a local care gap measurable by comparing demand and supply across 16 services, while its integrated-care programme shows that one person may need several connections. Your market may have different regulations, public funding, provider structures, and platform access. You can still examine where requests fail: at intake, provider response, scheduling, travel, or service completion.

What to check today

Call one city, county, or district that runs integrated care and spend 30 minutes asking how a recent case moved from intake to provider acceptance and a first visit. If the same user information is entered again three or more times, or if staff must call each provider separately to check acceptance, it may be worth testing a small coordination tool first.