Research on the Demands of the Elderly in the Community Home-Based Care Model

The community home-based care service, which refers to integrating the service resources around the community to provide elderly care service in the community, has become one of the dominant elderly service models. The effective integration of various resources around the community at the infancy stage of community home-based care service has a significant impact on the operation costs of elderly services institutions. However, the suitability of resource integration is highly dependent on the service demands for the elderly in community. Thus, obtaining accurate service demands for the elderly is very important in the development of the community home-based care service. In this paper, we focus on exploring the service demands of the elderly. First, we conduct a structured questionnaire survey of 2200 elderly in Fangshan District, Beijing, and collect the elderly’s demographic information and their community home-based care service demands. Second, we establish a service demand model, which presents the relationship between demographic information and the demands of community home-based care service, by using a business intelligence technique—decision tree to analyze the data. The result shows different demographic characteristics jointly affect the elderly’s community home-based care service demands and concludes the demand feature of three particular types of community home-based care services: door to door service, community medical service, and community non-medical service. This study illustrates that through the analysis of the elderly’s demographic data, we can effectively obtain the service demands for the elderly, and thus can more effectively integrate resources and improve the development efficiency of the community home-based care industry. This study also expands the research on elderly service by establishing a service demand model.