A startup founded by two financial services veterans has opened early access to a patented platform that converts health crises and late-life family decisions into structured, repeatable workflows for financial advisors.
Healthspan Wealth, launched in Falls Church, Virginia, by Thomas C. West and Suzanne Schmitt, is built around a core compliance problem that when a client receives a diagnosis or a family begins navigating a parent's decline, the advisors, attorneys, care managers, and family members who need to coordinate are working across regulatory siloes that weren't designed to communicate.
West, a managing senior partner at Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, a registered investment advisory firm with approximately $24.4 billion in assets under management, spent more than three decades watching that dynamic play out.
"For 30 years I've watched families hit a health event and discover their financial plan had no answer for it," West said. "Advisors want to help. They just don't have a process. They have the internet and a hunch."
Schmitt, who previously led aging investor strategy at Fidelity Investments, built the company's operational architecture with a focus on that specific obstacle. "Health and wealth decisions have never actually been separated, but the industry has historically treated them that way," she said. "We spent our engineering effort on that problem specifically. Once it's solved, you can finally give an advisor a repeatable process instead of just a referral."
The timing reflects a documented pressure point in the advice industry. According to Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2026, approximately 69% of wealth management executives consider longevity strategies and health-related wealth solutions to be their top priority when serving high-net-worth clients. At the same time, research suggests the supply of structured advisor tools for that work remains thin.
A separate analysis cited by CPA Trendlines in April 2026 found that approximately 65% of affluent investors seek health-insurance guidance from advisors, while only 4% report receiving health-care planning from their advisors.
Healthspan’s compliance architecture rests on five granted patents. One covers automated redaction and replacement of protected health information and personally identifiable information, allowing communication across professional teams without creating regulatory exposure.
A second patent uses multi-agent architecture so that context — an updated diagnosis, a change in a client's care situation — flows automatically to the relevant parts of the platform rather than requiring manual re-entry. A third patent governs role-aware prompting, guiding each participant, whether that is an advisor, a client, or an elder law attorney, through next steps that stay within their regulatory lane.
Two additional patents map household relationships and dependencies, and identify which decision-making journey a client and family need to take next.
Together, those capabilities underpin more than 100 advisor-aligned journeys - structured workflows that activate when a triggering event occurs, such as a client taking on caregiving responsibilities for an aging parent or receiving a serious diagnosis.
Each journey sequences tasks and prompts, logs every step, and produces a documented record of the advice process. Client data would not be stored by Healthspan Wealth, and using two of its five patents, personally identifiable information and personal health information would be redacted.
The platform also includes a journey builder that allows advisory firms to encode their own existing processes into the same structured format, converting institutional knowledge that might otherwise reside with a single experienced advisor into something the whole practice can deliver consistently.
For advisors keeping an eye on how healthcare needs shape retirement and estate planning, the platform's approach reflects growing recognition across the industry that longevity risk is not purely financial. As InvestmentNews has reported, advisors increasingly face opportunities to bridge the care and wealth planning gap as clients live longer and family structures grow more complex.
The business case for addressing those needs extends beyond client outcomes. West has framed it in part as an asset retention play - keeping clients and their assets with the same advisory relationship through life transitions that have historically caused attrition, and increasing the likelihood that the next generation continues with the same advisor.
Sanctuary Wealth, a hybrid RIA, moved in a parallel direction in late October 2026, partnering with elder care platform bQuest to add aging and long-term care guidance to its advisor toolkit. The emergence of multiple platforms targeting the same workflow gap suggests the market is moving from awareness of the problem to active product investment.
Healthspan Wealth is currently onboarding a limited number of advisor and firm partners through its early access program. The platform is targeting SOC 2 certification and a full launch in the first quarter of 2027.
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