After his mom’s cancer diagnosis, Jeremy Gurewitz built Solace to help patients

Even doctors can get lost in the healthcare system.

Jeremy Gurewitz learned that firsthand when his mother, a radiologist, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016. Despite her medical expertise, she struggled to navigate treatment options, insurance hurdles, and the complexity of coordinating care. And her experience isn’t unique.

A 2021 study published in Healthcare Services Research found that 73% of insured, nonelderly US adults had completed at least one healthcare-related administrative task in the prior year, and roughly one in three reported delayed or foregone care because of administrative burdens.

Gurewitz’s mother passed away in 2018. The experience inspired him to build and in 2022 launch Solace with co-founder Sara Sargent. The company connects patients with advocates who help them navigate medical decisions, insurance challenges, and care coordination.

“We connect folks with a healthcare advocate powered by AI,” Gurewitz explained to Founder Brew. “It’s a real human being, so it’s a real advocate. We have AI that enables them to be highly effective for people, do whatever you need for them to do, and it’s all covered by insurance.”

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Gurewitz discussed the gaps his mother’s experience exposed, why navigating care remains difficult, and what he underestimated about building Solace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your mother was a radiologist and deeply familiar with medicine. What did her experience reveal about the healthcare system that even medical professionals struggle with?

Medicine can be complicated, and that’s why we have physicians, but having the interactions of clarity of, “What is the diagnosis? What are the treatment options? What are the different pathways I might be able to go down?” All that is oftentimes not clearly stated, or even if it is, the follow-ups or additional questions are often very difficult to have answered.

US healthcare sucks…It’s difficult to schedule an appointment. It’s difficult to get your notes. It’s difficult to find the treatments. It’s difficult to get the pharmaceuticals…When you’re sick and going through it, that’s the last thing you’re really able to do.

There are a lot of companies trying to improve healthcare access. What did you see others missing that led you to build Solace?

Healthcare advocates do an extraordinary job, and that was something I think very few people understood. It was a smaller industry, so I got to speak to a lot of them and really see the job they did. The insight was that if we could build a technological platform that enabled the advocates to be more effective—and, very early on, use AI to enable the advocates to do their jobs more effectively—that would allow a lot more patients to work with advocates while allowing advocates to focus on the parts of their jobs that are most important.

Healthcare is increasingly becoming an AI-driven space. What parts of healthcare navigation still require a human advocate?

Working with the advocate is a first step of just like: What exactly is the diagnosis? What are the things that you’re facing? The advocate is enabling you to lay out the plans.

There’s a long list of things that AI can’t do on behalf of people. That involves interacting with the US healthcare system, figuring out the problems people might be facing—whether they’re small or large—dealing with bureaucracy, and unlocking some of the challenges people encounter. You could go down a very long list of things that an advocate can do on behalf of the patient.

What assumptions did you have when you started Solace that turned out to be wrong?

We thought it would go faster than it did. It took us about two years from when we started the company to when the company we really took off, and we started to see product-market fit…It took time to really build it because we were pioneering the market.

Has your personal connection to this problem ever made it harder to make tough business decisions?

I want to be able to help everybody at 100% perfection…It’s so difficult for me to know that we’re not helping every single one perfectly. It’s the right ethos, even though rationally I know it’s very hard to get to 100%. I’ve tried to stay focused on doing what’s right and what’s going to be most important for everyone, but it can be hard sometimes as I think about my mom’s experience.

I speak with my co-founder a lot. She’s incredible, and so we have a really strong relationship in terms of what we’re doing. What are the things that are going to move the needle forward a little bit more each day? That’s how I think about spending my time and how I can try and make the right decision.