CEO Spotlight Interview
AI-Enabled Patient Advocates for Medicare Members
Sam Wu & Kevin Bailey, Co-Founders, Understood Care
Co-Founder Backgrounds
Sam comes from a healthcare operations and investing background. Kevin Bailey is a 2x founder and former engineer at Uber. Together, they started Understood Care in March 2025 because millions of Medicare patients—seniors and people with disabilities—weren't getting the care they needed, not for lack of better treatments, but because the system was too complex to navigate. The timing was right: new CMS regulations made advocacy reimbursable and affordable for patients, and rapid advances in AI enabled them to finally deliver advocacy at scale.
“Millions of Medicare patients weren't getting the care they needed—not for lack of better treatments, but because the system was too complex to navigate.”
“New CMS regulations made advocacy reimbursable, and advances in AI made it possible to deliver at scale. The timing was right.”
The Founding of Understood Care
Sam and Kevin launched Understood Care in March 2025, driven by a clear gap: a long list of non-clinical reasons patients can't access care—inadequate housing, food insecurity, lack of transportation, and poor care coordination. Two forces aligned to make the moment right. New CMS regulations made advocacy reimbursable and affordable for patients. And rapid advances in AI finally made it possible to deliver that advocacy at scale. The result is a model that matches every Medicare member with a dedicated, compassionate advocate who works with them one-on-one to resolve their specific problems—while AI handles the administrative burden behind the scenes.
The Problems Being Solved with AI-Enabled Advocacy
There's a long list of non-clinical reasons patients can't access care: inadequate housing, food insecurity, lack of transportation, and poor care coordination. Understood Care matches every patient with a dedicated, compassionate advocate who works with them one-on-one to resolve their specific problems. Behind the scenes, their AI assistant Ava handles the administrative burden—transcribing and summarizing calls, drafting faxes, emails, and texts, finding relevant resources, and generating compliant documentation—so advocates can stay focused on the patients. Most patients pay $0 out of pocket.
“Our advocates stay focused on patients. Ava handles everything else.”
Ava is purpose-built to remove the friction that slows advocacy down. By handling transcription, documentation, resource discovery, and compliant drafting automatically, the platform ensures that human advocates can spend their time where it matters most—with patients. The model is designed so that the technology is invisible to the patient, but powerful enough to make every advocate dramatically more effective.
A Future-Forward Partnership: Understood Care and Tau Ventures
Tau has been genuinely collaborative from the start. The team has been extremely generous with introductions and easy to work with—the kind of honest, supportive relationship that makes a real difference as the company scales.