New feature reduces the time families, hospitals, and social workers spend searching for housing – starting in Durham, expanding Ontario-wide and across Canada.
Toronto, ON – August 29, 2025 – Elderado.ca, Ontario’s trusted platform for researching long-term care and retirement homes, today announced the launch of its Availability Registry, a digital tool designed to help families, hospital discharge planners, and social workers quickly identify available and suitable suites in retirement homes across the province. The milestone comes just six months after Elderado was accepted into the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation’s (CABHI) Ignite program, whose support has been instrumental in accelerating this next phase of growth.
In moments of crisis, families are often forced to make fast decisions – calling dozens of homes, touring facilities, and navigating unclear pricing – only to discover that there are no vacancies or that the home is far beyond their budget. Elderado’s new tool offers a centralized, up-to-date registry that shows real-time availability and optional starting prices to dramatically simplify this process for people researching their options.
Note: The Registry is specific to retirement homes, which are private and operate on a fee-for-service model. Long-term care (LTC) homes in Ontario – which are government-funded – follow a separate, centralized intake system and are not included due to saturated vacancy rates and waitlists.
Hospitals across Ontario continue to struggle with ALC (“Alternate Level of Care”) bed backlogs – cases where seniors no longer need acute care but remain in hospital because suitable continuing care options aren’t clear. Social workers and discharge planners often spend dozens of hours per case phoning homes for updates, with no centralized resource to guide decisions. As a result, many seniors stay in hospital longer than necessary while suitable retirement home suites sit empty.
While retirement homes are not the right fit for every senior, connecting those who can access this private form of care delivers two critical benefits: freeing up hospital capacity for higher-needs patients, and easing pressure on Ontario’s long-term care system.
Many retirement homes are ready and willing to accept new residents – whether for short-term respite stays or long-term living – but the information is fragmented and difficult to access in real time.
Elderado.ca’s Availability Registry aims to close this gap – helping connect those ready to accept residents with those desperately in need of care.
The Availability Registry enables participating retirement homes to post up-to-date availability in four key care categories at this time:
● Memory Care
● Respite Care
● Independent Living
● Assisted Living
Each registry listing may also include optional starting price information, helping families avoid the frustration of touring homes outside their financial means. The result is a faster, more transparent decision-making process for everyone involved.
The project was launched first in the Durham Region, with active plans of expanding across Ontario and Canada-wide.
In the wake of Ontario’s Bill 7: More Beds, Better Care Act, the pressure to reduce ALC occupancy has never been greater. The legislation’s aim is clear: move seniors out of hospital and into appropriate care settings faster. But without access to a full picture of available options – especially fee-based retirement homes that might better align with a senior’s needs and preferences – families often feel rushed into the LTC system, or worse, think it is their only option, even when more suitable alternatives exist.
At the same time, Canada’s healthcare system faces mounting fiscal challenges. As Rosalie Wyonch noted in her April 9, 2024 publication “Scenarios for Seniors’ Care: Future Challenges, Current Gaps and Strategies to Address Them”, “Across the country, more than $1 of every $4 of provincial government healthcare spending goes to caring for people over 75 years of age.”
She continues:
“Despite significant growth in total healthcare spending on seniors, per capita spending has declined in some provinces, showing that there is extremely limited fiscal capacity to increase spending per senior.”
Elderado believes that improving coordination between retirement homes and social service professionals can help ease this burden – not by replacing the public system, but by better utilizing the capacity that already exists in the private sector.
Elderado isn’t the only one noticing this shift. Boots-on-the-ground professionals in the space are seeing the same issue.
Pauline Lyons, Community Relations Director at AMICA Senior Lifestyles says:
“We are seeing an increase in the need for Memory Care options in Durham since we opened in February 2024. Families are facing complex challenges as they learn of the huge shortage in hospital and long term care beds. In June of 2025, our new Whitby location, AMICA Taunton, opened a second Memory Care floor to further support families in crisis situations. We continue to support families in finding the tools to navigate the choices available to them.”
Canada must continue to build capacity to serve our aging population, both in the private and social sectors.
“I started Elderado after a personal experience. Families deserve a simpler, clearer way to navigate senior housing – and that vision has guided us since day one,” said Daniel Clarke, Founder of Elderado.ca. Clarke recently shared this story on RBC’s The Next Stage podcast, highlighting Elderado’s mission to help families make better, faster decisions under pressure.
That mission has entered a new phase of growth with the addition of Andrew McBurney, a software engineer with a decade of experience in web and software development. “What excited me about joining Daniel and Elderado was the chance to apply technology to a deeply human problem. It’s not just about building software – it’s about building tools that ease the burden for families and the professionals who support them,” said McBurney.
Elderado’s Availability Registry improves not only the experience for families, but also for retirement home staff and social workers, who often struggle to maintain connections across a fragmented system. By creating shared visibility, the platform strengthens coordination for everyone involved in the care journey.
The team is now scaling the platform with national expansion underway, including French-language support.
While Elderado was launched and established through Clarke’s passion, drive, and personal savings, its recent acceleration – including the development of the Availability Registry – has been made possible by support from the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI) via its Ignite Program. This funding has enabled rapid iteration, real-world testing, and the recruitment of technical talent to help push what’s possible in the Canadian AgeTech space.
The results so far include:
● A significant rise in weekly active users (currently at 1,162 average a week)
● Two full-time salaried employees in Ontario
● Five paid internships for emerging professionals at Canadian post-secondary institutions.
“We’re just getting started.” continues Daniel Clarke. “Since CAHBI’s investment, we’ve been able to acquire the tech and team to begin scaling. The numbers don’t lie – we’ve grown from 512 weekly active users in March to an average of 1,162 weekly active users in August.”
Want to see the registry in action? Just Google Search “Elderado Availability Registry” and you’ll find us!
Original source: https://www.elderado.ca/blog/2025-august-29-press-release-elderado-launches-availability-registry-in-ontario
