The Healthcare System Is Too Complex to Navigate Alone

01 /The Concept

"Don't navigate your health challenges alone," says Solace. Instead, it offers patients a dedicated "health advocate" – a trained professional who helps them make sense of their situation and figure out what to do next.

The problems these advocates handle span the full range of healthcare complexity: understanding a diagnosis, finding the right doctor or clinic, coordinating treatment for chronic conditions, answering questions that come up before or during care. This applies whether someone is navigating their own health or managing care for a family member.

Solace recruits its advocates from inside the healthcare system – former nurses, therapists, and other clinicians who bring both the credentials and the real-world experience to actually be useful.

Advocates can speak directly with physicians on a patient's behalf, translating clinical language into terms the patient can act on. They schedule appointments, maintain records of test results, scans, and diagnoses, and generally help patients navigate the system rather than be swallowed by it.

To get started, a user submits a request describing their situation through the Solace app. The platform matches them with the most appropriate advocate for their case. From there, patients can meet with their advocate by voice or video call through the app, walking through the next steps of their care journey. If forms need filling out or appointments need booking, the advocate handles it.

For unexpected developments between sessions, the advocate is reachable for unplanned consultations and can advise on how to respond.

Solace was founded in 2022 and has since helped 14,000 patients and their families.

The company raised $7 million in summer 2023, $14 million the following summer, and has now closed a $60 million round at a valuation above $300 million. At the start of this year, Solace reached a $10 million annualized revenue run rate – and it's still climbing.

02 /Why It Matters

Solace raised this round "to make health advocacy the new standard of care."

As the co-founder argues, the healthcare system has grown so complex that patients can no longer effectively navigate it on their own. Helping them do so should stop being a supplementary support function and become a structural, integrated part of how care is delivered.

Critically, Solace isn't just building a marketplace for experts. Under the hood is a full medical information system: a longitudinal patient record tracking every question asked and action taken. Advocates work in tight integration with that technology layer, which substantially accelerates and improves their effectiveness.

Insurance companies are starting to agree. Some have already begun covering health advocacy costs for their members. Medicare – the US government health insurance program for people over 65 – made the same move last year, immediately opening Solace to an additional 65 million potential users.

Transcarent has been moving in a similar direction with its "Just Ask Transcarent" feature, which it calls health guides – and which leans more heavily on an AI engine to improve speed, efficiency, and scale. Last May, Transcarent raised $126 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. Solace looks like a strong candidate to follow a similar path.

03 /Opportunities

Healthcare is one of the largest, most permanent markets in existence. Anyone who has tried to navigate a serious health situation knows the system isn't kind to patients operating alone.

The obvious objection is that not everyone will pay out of pocket for this – many people will assume they can figure it out themselves using search or AI.

But the more important development is that insurance companies are starting to pay for it. Advocates can make treatment faster and more effective, which reduces what insurers spend on care overall. That alignment of incentives means advocacy could effectively become free for patients – which would dramatically expand the addressable audience.

We may be at the beginning of a significant inflection point for services like this, and the examples above show it's already in motion. These changes will eventually play out in every country, because the underlying dysfunction in healthcare systems is essentially universal.

Building a health advocacy service – particularly one positioned to grow as insurance coverage expands – is the clearest opportunity here. And building it right could realistically produce a billion-dollar company.

As a side thought: healthcare probably isn't the only domain where consumers are lost in a broken, complex system and would benefit from an expert advocate. What other categories are ripe for the same model?