July 15, 2026
A Nova Scotian can order dinner, book a flight and hire a contractor from a phone in a few taps. Coordinating care for an aging parent is somehow still the hard part. That contrast is the starting point for one of the more interesting consumer technology bets being built in the province right now, and it is the through-line of the latest episode of All Hands on Tech.
The guest was Alan MacKeen, managing partner and co-founder of Home and Health, a Nova Scotia platform that connects families with vetted caregivers, health providers and home support. The conversation was not really about long-term care beds or wait lists. It was about software: whether the two-sided marketplace model that reshaped rides, rentals and food delivery can be pointed at one of the most personal services there is.
That is a Nova Scotia digital-economy story before it is an aging story. The demand is real and growing, and the company trying to meet it is a local tech build.
The gap is not supply. It is coordination, and that is a software problem.
“We can order a meal on our phone, we can book a vacation in seconds on our phone,” said MacKeen, “but we can’t coordinate care for one of our loved ones very easily.”
The gap is the actual experience of most families when a parent’s situation changes, and it usually arrives without notice. MacKeen described his own version from just before Christmas last year. His father, healthy and independent and his blind mother’s main caregiver, had a sudden health event. Within days the family was arranging overnight stays, driving between Truro and Halifax, and making what he called “the endless emails and voicemails and phone calls” it takes to find help.
“Everything can be going right the day before,” he said. “All of a sudden, it’s chaos.”
The public conversation about aging is usually about building more capacity: more long-term care beds, more staff. Both are real and both matter. But a large share of what families run into is a matching problem. The care they need often exists somewhere nearby. There is no good way to find it, vet it and book it when the moment comes, so people fall back on Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji and word of mouth at the worst possible time.
The scale is significant. A Statistics Canada estimate from 2024 puts roughly 1.8 million Canadians are part of what’s known as the sandwich generation—people caring for both children and care-dependent adults. Two-thirds of these non-retired caregivers reported that those responsibilities had affected their employment. The 2026 Caring in Canada report from the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence adds that working caregivers provide about five hours of active care a day on top of their jobs. Much of that time is not spent delivering care. It is spent trying to find it—the part a platform can take off their plate.
A two-sided marketplace, pointed at care
Home and Health borrows the architecture of the on-demand economy and adapts it to a service that economy has mostly avoided. A family searches for a provider, books them and pays, in what MacKeen described as a three-step flow. Providers set their own hours, rates and travel radius. Families read reviews, see star ratings and pick the person rather than taking whoever is on shift.
“If you find somebody you click with,” MacKeen said, “then we can book that individual every week,” so the relationship and the trust compound over time in a way a rotating-roster agency model does not allow.
The two-sided design also reaches supply the conventional system cannot. Nova Scotia has one of the oldest populations in the country. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that 22.2 percent of Nova Scotians were 65 or older in 2024, the third-highest share among provinces, and the province’s median age held at 43.3 in 2025, also third-highest.
At the same time, the care workforce is stretched. Nova Scotia Health reported its nursing vacancy rate at roughly 17 per cent in early 2025, according to the Halifax Examiner. On the episode, MacKeen cited the same figure and added that, by his account, 50 to 60 per cent of new Nova Scotia nursing graduates leave the province soon after finishing.
His point was that the people have not all left the field. Retired nurses not ready to fully stop. Newcomers with strong medical backgrounds waiting on credential recognition. Students building experience. People who cannot do a twelve-hour overnight shift but could do five flexible hours a week. A platform that lets a provider set their own terms turns that hard-to-schedule capacity into bookable supply.
Trust is the feature, not the marketing
Every marketplace has to solve trust, but most do it for a coffee order or a spare room. Home and Health is sending a stranger into a parent’s home, which raises the bar, and MacKeen was direct that this is the real barrier, not cost or scheduling.
“Inviting a stranger into your home for the first time is a huge trust barrier,” he said.
The platform’s response is built into onboarding, not bolted on after. Every provider, “whether you walk the dog, shovel the driveway, or do nursing services,” passes at minimum a vulnerable sector check and a criminal background check, with a registered nurse reviewing the roster and often running a video call before a provider is listed. MacKeen calls it the circle of trust. The verification happens upstream, before a name appears in front of a family, rather than being one more thing for an overwhelmed caregiver to chase.
The trust layer extends to who the caregiver is. The platform lets a family choose a provider who shares a parent’s language, food, and customs. For newcomers it cuts both ways: someone still waiting on credential recognition, or building English, can serve families from their own community. It is a small product decision with an outsized effect on whether that first visit feels safe.
The build worth watching
None of this is solved. A two-sided marketplace only works if both sides grow together, in every community, not just Halifax, and MacKeen was candid that getting the word out is the hard part. The company is early, and the demographic math it is built against is only getting steeper.
That is what makes it worth following from inside the province’s tech sector. The aging-at-home challenge is usually described as a shortage. A closer look suggests it is at least as much a coordination and trust problem layered on top of a real shortage, and those are problems software can be designed to carry. Whether or not any one platform succeeds, a Nova Scotia company is treating a hard, human problem as a build. That is the kind of bet a thriving local digital economy should be making.
To hear the full conversation, listen to All Hands on Tech, Episode 85, with Alan MacKeen of Home and Health, available wherever you get your podcasts.