JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

All ageing societies face the challenge of allocating limited resources to highest value use. The sharing economy provides one method to address the imbalance between the demand and supply of health services to the elderly population. With a huge aging population, China’s practices in the sharing aging industry may set examples for other “getting old before getting rich” countries.

Objective:

There is a gap in both the data and the research on China’s aging industry sharing economy. This article addresses these data and research lacunae by constructing a framework for the application of a sharing model in China's aging industry; by assessing the current state of the aging industry sharing economy; by setting out the challenges to the sharing aging health care and service economy; and by making recommendations for the development of aging industry sharing economy.

Methods:

This article constructs a sharing economy framework in aging industry covering four aspects: “People”, “Facilities”, “Capital” and “Information”, to test the current state and future prospects of China’s aging industry sharing economy.

Results:

In people sharing, we analyzed the sharing of emotional companionship, doctors, nurses, nursing attendants and domestic helpers. We discussed facility sharing models from the point of land and housing, medical devices and other items, like pensioner meals and shared medicine bins. We acknowledge that crowdfunding platforms have developed fast in China, but many elderly users faced problems in their operation. Information sharing is a developing field, which can optimize users’ experiences and should help the elderly filter out misinformation, but China currently does not have adequate sharing information platforms for the elderly.

Conclusions:

We identified four major challenges to China's aging industry sharing economy: poor adaptability to technology of the elderly; mediocre quality of shared services; “one size fits all” and concept of the “useless elderly”; and shortage of qualified practitioners. We make recommendations for specific measures by governments, communities and enterprises to improve the sharing economy in the aging industry.