Healthspan Wealth, an artificial intelligence-supported platform built to help financial advisors (as well as healthcare and legal professionals) guide families through issues and decisions related to longevity and health, has launched early access, seeking a limited number of advisor and firm partners.
Thomas C. West and Suzanne Schmitt, two veterans of the advisory and financial services industries, founded the company in 2025 and already hold five patents related to core processes for compliant information sharing and advisory workflows, which are foundational to how the platform works.
More specifically, those patents reflect the necessary work involved in securely and compliantly sharing sensitive data and information among a client, their advisors, families and other members of their care or financial teams.
The two said that repeatedly, through the course of their careers, they had seen families hit by a health event only to discover that their financial plans, and often their advisors, lacked the flexibility to respond to those issues effectively.
West, a managing senior partner at Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, and Schmitt, who helped lead aging-investor strategy and wellness at several firms, including Fidelity, Lincoln Financial, New York Life and Prudential, are seeking advisors who would like to kick the tires on the technology through an early-access program.
“We’re trying to give advisors better tools so that when they’re encountering existing or new client relationships, they’re not bystanders, they are educated, they are empowered and they have obvious next best actions, and a better ability to connect with outside professional disciplines to drive better outcomes for their clients,” said West, referring to the impetus for building Healthspan.
Most advisors rely on a handful of accumulation-phase financial planning applications, including eMoney Advisor, Envestnet | MoneyGuide, and RightCapital, among others, in working with their clients. Whereas only a little more than 18% of advisors report using distribution-phase tools that are specific to retirement income planning, according to the 2026 T3 Inside Information Software Survey of advisors (examples of those tools would include Income Lab and IncomeConductor, among others). And fewer still, at just over 7%, according to the same survey, report using software specifically for planning healthcare costs, such as Move Health or Waterlilly.
Nonetheless, Healthspan seeks to fill yet another unsupported role by helping advisors become more effective quarterbacks for their clients and families when a health issue arises, mitigating the exposure most firms are unwilling to take on in sharing protected health information and financial data, and enabling secure, compliant coordination.
Among Healthspan Wealth’s five patents is one that covers automated redaction and replacement of protected health information and personally identifiable information, allowing communication across advisors, clients and care teams.
Another of the patents covers a visual mapping of households, dependents, proxies and professional team members that exposes unmet needs and held-away relationships.
The fifth patent uses simple questions to determine which decision-making ‘journey’ a client and their family may need to take and sequence them in order of importance.
In total, the platform to date provides more than 100 advisor-aligned, event-based and functional journeys that take health- and longevity-related events and break them into step-by-step, repeatable and auditable workflows that advisors and firms can customize.
In a nutshell, a triggering event (say, a client or their spouse has to go unexpectedly into long-term care) matches the scenarios built into the platform, which the advisor can then use to determine what should happen for each participant. Advisors are provided with conversation topics to help assess the situation and support their own planning, including legal documents and other needs. The entire sequence and steps followed are logged, producing a documented record of the advice process.
To date, the duo has made the strategic decision to self-fund their efforts and has not sought outside capital to better protect the intellectual property behind their approach before publicly revealing it when going to market.
“We have a point of view about the way that we’re going to be impacting our clients that had enough conviction that we wanted to bootstrap and go narrow and deep on these patents,” said West.
Co-founder Schmitt, Healthplan’s COO, said that the premise used to explain to advisors tends to resonate easily with them.
“It is the leaky bucket, where assets are attriting from every firm’s book for a combination of reasons: aging clients, lack of awareness of successor decision makers, related healthcare costs, etc.,” she said.
“So we’re trying to change the frame and move away from thinking of risk mitigation into managing an opportunity to help the client and family through things that they would otherwise struggle through by equipping the advisors with the right tools,” said Schmitt.
Advisors can request a demo and sign up for a Nov. 18 webinar on the Healthspan Wealth website.