Understood Care
Healthcare personal assistants for Medicare patients.
What is Understood Care?
Understood Care is a virtual patient advocacy platform for patients with Medicare.
Advocates are administrative assistants with healthcare expertise that unblock access to care for patients. Advocates can help patients find transportation, schedule appointments, apply for financial aid and much more. We use AI to help advocates deliver superior advocacy at scale.
Patient advocacy became a new Medicare covered benefit in 2024. Most Understood Care patients pay $0 out of pocket.
The Problem
The American healthcare system is notoriously complex. 72% of insured adults lack confidence in managing their health insurance and benefits.
For the 68 million Medicare beneficiaries, these challenges are even greater. Barriers in technology, finances, and health literacy often keep Medicare patients from accessing care, driving worse health outcomes and higher costs to the system.
The number of patients experiencing this problem is only growing. By 2030, the number of Medicare beneficiaries is projected to reach 80 million.
How does Understood Care work?
1️⃣ Patient signs up on website or by calling in.
2️⃣ We check the patient’s insurance eligibility and complete a patient intake with our clinical team.
3️⃣ We get the patient matched with the advocate that best fits their needs.
4️⃣ The advocate uses Understood Care’s clinical expertise and AI tools to resolve each patient’s unique care needs.
Examples of problems we’ve helped patients tackle:
⚠️ Problem: Patient could no longer drive to his appointments.
✅ Solution: We set the patient up with free county medical transportation.
⚠️ Problem: The patient did not have money to afford proper food.
✅ Solution: We signed the patient up for a program that delivers free nutritious meals to low income seniors.
⚠️ Problem: Patient received a new diagnosis and was overwhelmed.
✅ Solution: We helped the patient go over the doctor’s instructions and scheduled appointments with in network specialists.
Milestones
⭐ We helped our first patient in April and are currently supporting 300+ patients.
⭐ Active in 40 states.
⭐ Able to accept Medicare, UHC, Humana and Aetna (top 3 Medicare Advantage plans).
Team
Understood Care is built by a team fluent in AI, healthcare operations, and clinical care.
Sam (CEO) was an operator at several high growth healthcare tech startups including Finni, SiteRx, and Cedar. Ex-Carlyle, ex-Evercore.
Kevin (CTO) was a previous 2x founder (1x in browser tech, 1x in enterprise VDI). Ex- Uber/Postmates.
Dr. Adam Bonder (Medical Director) was previously the Medical Director at a VC backed behavioral health practice and is a actively practicing ER doc.
Asks
✔️ Please share our website with friends or family that could benefit from our services.
✔️ Please help us spread the word to other healthcare and community organizations - we accept referrals through our website.
🍃 Ply Health: Get providers in network faster
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Understood Care advocacy will greatly reduce non-medical barriers to care for Medicare patients.Patient advocacy has two fundamental components - a search component and a delivery component.As an example, a common problem for our patients is around transportation. Patients who can no longer drive need alternative transportation to go to doctor’s appointments, shops and social events. However, there are two main issues:* Search problem: Though there are county, state, insurance and non-profit sponsored transportation programs, they are not well advertised. Each program has their own bespoke qualification criteria. Patients can’t tell find the right solution.* Delivery problem: The application process for a program usually involves long forms asking for extensive information. Patients need help completing paperwork.At Understood Care, we are solving both problems with the use of AI agents.Our advocate agent centralizes and progressively learns from the collective expertise of every Understood Care advocate as well as previous successful patient encounter to confidently identify and predict with the most relevant, accurate, and statistically best solution for our advocates to present to the patient.Our workflow agent automates tasks such as form completion and real-time note-taking, helping our advocates solve the patient’s problem faster.
