Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:34:28 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:34:28] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the thing is there's tons of companies that are working to solve these, like, very nitty gritty, the the terms interconnectivity or interoperability problems within health care. And so in the future, and we think it'll be through Solace, all of your health records, all of your information will be in one simple place. There will be tools to kind of demonstrate kind of what's happened, what you need, and given the latest information, what you should be doing. And And all that will be encompassed by your healthcare advocate who you have a strong relationship with and who's going be able to help guide you on every step along the way. So that's very clearly where healthcare is going to go. And I think when you think about that in the future, there's all sorts of really positive things that come from that. Because when people aren't constrained like right now, people are so tightly constrained in terms of like everything is super tight. There's no availability for anything. You're so desperate to see somebody. You're willing to take pretty much anything. In the future, when everything is beautifully oriented, everything is really nicely done using AI tools. Like, we're not like an AI doomer by any stretch of the imagination. We believe AI can be a tool for good. It's not going to be the only thing. There's some people that want to believe that it's going to be like Blade Runner where there's AI. AI is going to run everything, which who knows? I personally don't think that's going be the case. I think AI is going to be a tool that's going to be used super effectively for people, but it's not gonna be the only thing. And so having the advocate that has all of that at their fingertips, that's like the connective tissue across The US healthcare system where you as a person, when you're going through your own healthcare experience, everything is beautifully oriented. Like if you think about the top tier consumer experiences, pick your consumer app of choice or your consumer experience where you're like, this is an excellent, excellent experience. You could think about luxury brands or high end hotels. That's the way healthcare is going to be in the future. And our mission at Solace is to make that a reality.
00:36:26 · Charlotte Ross, Alexa von Tobel
[00:36:26] S2: And I think you touched upon AI a bit. And I think your superpower at Solace is the product and just how robust and expansive the product is. And obviously, we believe alongside you that there's a real element of humanity that needs to exist in the process. But talk a little bit about how you are infusing AI into the patient experience via your product roadmap. [00:36:54] S1: And I want to piggyback on that and just add. So there may not be a better example of a critical, extremely scary life moment of a decision where people want a human. Right? Like, I think Solace may be, like, a perfect example of when a person wants a human. How do you think about when you get a human and when AI supports it? And how do you think about that as you guys develop the product?
00:37:19 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:37:19] S0: Yeah. So it's very clear to me that when people have very, very narrowly tailored questions, want to Google, I don't know, how many red blood cells are in a drop of blood or something. Yeah, obviously, AI is how you go to that. But when you have a broad problem that you need a solution for, you want a human. And especially when it's broad and uncertain and honestly really scary, a huge amount of of not only just desire, but also value is having a human being organizing the entire thing. And so when we think about kind of health care advocacy in the future and what Solace does, person to person relationship, person to person contact, especially when you're dealing with a Medicare population or even somebody who's really sick. I have to say, my mom's experience, she was someone who knew everything about felt like to me knew everything about health care and, you know, was a physician and honestly served as an advocate basically for many of her family members. When she got sick, she did not have... She wasn't the same person anymore. She didn't have the capacity to do that. And that's something that I think so many people forget is that when you're going through that, you need somebody to be able to take care of you and handle kind of these types of things. So to us, the person to person relationship is incredibly powerful, and, like, I I don't see any kind of risk there. Now, Charlotte, to answer your question about kind of like, well, how do we use AI? We think that AI can be useful in so many different ways. So we have AI copilots for our advocates. So if advocates have particular questions about very narrowly tailored things, they can ask the AI. We have our own proprietary dataset. So basically, we have a huge clinical team. We have, I mentioned, researchers and doctors and people who know so many things about health care. We've created our own data set that the AI can refer to. So that includes clinical information, very carefully sourced and vetted research, as well as the information that we have about how advocates are helping patients in reality. And so that's one of the things that I think people don't appreciate. You guys appreciated it when you invested, but just the opportunity about having that compounding data moat is something that I think is really, really powerful because we take, everything goes to the platform.
00:39:37 · Jeremy Gurewitz, Charlotte Ross, Alexa von Tobel
We're able to work with the advocates and see how they're able to help problems. And we gather that information and have it in our system for the future so that it helps the network more broadly. [00:39:48] S2: The example that I remember your co founder Sarah shared with us was I think one patient had wanted a seeing eye dog. Yeah. And obviously like that's a that's a unique request. Right? But you guys built into the product a whole pathway for when the next time that comes around, it's like an instantaneous deliverable. [00:40:13] S0: Exactly. Exactly. [00:40:16] S1: Jeremy, just given that you have an interesting perch, what are your predictions for health care as you think about just where, you know, it's 2026, this wild wave of AI. Everyone thinks AI is gonna do everything. What do you see as just, like, your predictions of where the world could be? And this is not just Solace. This is just the whole category in a decade. What's what's obvious to you that maybe isn't obvious to everyone that's listening about AI and health care? [00:40:44] S0: I'll make a few fun predictions. Some of [00:40:46] S1: them We be want some predictions.
00:40:48 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:40:48] S0: Well, some of will be out there. So some of them will be a little nitty gritty. And then some of them will be maybe more broad, fun ones. So nitty gritty, the restriction on physician owned hospitals will go away. So right now, there's a regulation that says that physicians are not allowed to own hospitals. And again, like most health care regulation, the spirit of it was that people were concerned that physicians would direct folks to their own hospitals. And we don't want that. But the reality is that now it just has meant that hospitals are owned by for profit companies. And again, some were for profit companies. Some of them can be good. But some of them don't really do a good job. Or these kind of giant nonprofits, which again, operate as local monopolies. And so to me, it's very clear that... And I think you see this in so many categories across the board is when you have competition and when you have choice for people that ends up resulting in generally better outcomes because people have to push for it. So the restriction for physician owned hospitals will go away. There's been a lot of really interesting models, different care delivery models in terms of like, cause right now you imagine a hospital and it's this giant building with like a thousand different things in it. But it doesn't need to be that way. There can actually be micro hospitals or kind of like very small tailored particular things to a specific treatment. There's no reason why it all has to be in this giant super complex operational thing. And so I think in the future, there's gonna be way more choices and way more opportunities for people to experiment with different ways to help people on their most critical pieces of need. So that's one kind of piece. I think one of the other things in the future is like, as I mentioned, it's very, very clear to me that all of the data problems will eventually go to a way. So that's one of the biggest things, getting health records, connectivity, treatments, matching all that. Right now, the systems are so bad. It's like you have all that.
00:42:44 · Jeremy Gurewitz
And it's very clear that in the future, by default, and Charlotte, you and I were talking about this briefly, every single interaction you have with any practitioner across the health care system will be recorded, uploaded somewhere, captured, and going to be matched across your your own medical record. And so in the future, all of that data will be existing, captured by AI. Capture is the wrong word. Analyzed by AI and used to kind of predict what's going to matter the most for you in the future. And I think the last thing and this is something that I think there's a lot of companies that are really working on this and we'll see is I do really think personalized medicine will become a real thing. So I think there's been a lot of attempts on it, and it's still very far away in the future. But if you read a lot of the clinical research, they're getting closer and closer to understanding the chemical interactions, again, with the power of AI. And so I do really think that in the future, there are going to be treatments that are tailored to you very specifically. The more research we have, the more we see that people's biomes are totally different. Not even like your genetic code, but even just like the way your cells are oriented, the way your gut operates. And so in the future, there's going to be very tailored treatments to use specifically that's going to help in a broad variety of ways. So hopefully that's interesting enough.