PatientLead Health was built in response to a healthcare system that leaves too many capable people feeling defeated and disoriented in moments when they need clarity most.
Before launching PatientLead Health, company founder Carrie Schluter spent seven years working as a private patient advocate. That work followed an earlier career in corporate communications, where her job was to make complex information actionable under pressure. In advocacy, she saw the same dynamic play out again and again, only with much higher stakes.
Private patient advocacy works. Done well, it's very effective. It's also expensive. A concierge service by design, patient advocacy requires hours of preparation, coordination, follow-up, and real-time decision-making. That reality forces prices beyond the reach of many people, especially those already burdened by medical bills, reduced income, or long-term uncertainty.
Again and again, Carrie met with women between the ages of 20 and 50 who came to her asking for help. They were navigating care during years when health intersects with work, family, fertility, caregiving, and long-term planning, often while symptoms were complex, evolving, or poorly explained.
These were smart, accomplished women who were deeply motivated to get their health back on track. Most had already done what the system tells patients to do. They researched their conditions and tracked their symptoms. They showed up to appointments prepared. They pushed through fatigue, brain fog, pain, and doubt to keep going.
And yet they kept hitting barriers they hadn’t anticipated.
They described feeling confused rather than confident. Appointments that generated more questions than answers. Subtle dismissal, shifting explanations, and a sense that their story was being flattened or misinterpreted in the medical record. Many were exhausted. Some were nearly defeated. Most of them believed they had already tried everything, but their efforts just weren't working.
They had intelligence, drive, and resilience. But they lacked a framework. They were at sea without a compass.
Navigator was created to provide something patients rarely receive: a clear, structured way to understand what's happening to them, what matters now, what can wait, and how to make defensible decisions inside a complex and often inconsistent healthcare system.
The Navigator framework is deliberately orienting. It reduces noise, clarifies signals, and helps patients steer their own care experience with greater confidence and coherence. It focuses on pattern recognition over time, alignment between lived experience and documentation, and practical decision thresholds rather than endless information gathering.
Build a deliberate framework that informs your next step.
Separate real change from urgency, default responses, and accumulated confusion.
Focus on what actually helps. Let go of what doesn't.
Pacing is flexible. Partial engagement is expected. There is no optimization pressure.
The healthcare system controls the narrative about how care is supposed to work. What takes time is the process of critical recalibration: separating the system narrative from the reality of how care actually unfolds.
Patterns surface gradually. Assumptions adjust. Signals become clearer about where decisions are made, what carries weight, and where effort changes outcomes. Navigator is paced to support that recalibration, rather than forcing insight in moments of crisis.
Across six months, you build a clearer picture of what is happening, what matters now, and how to respond in ways that hold up over time. Each phase builds on the last, reinforcing continuity and helping you carry forward what you've already learned instead of starting over at each appointment. This structure reflects reality: chronic conditions are navigated, not solved.
Navigator was created so more people could access the benefits of experienced patient advocacy without the cost of private, one-on-one services. The program price was deliberately set below that of a single hour of traditional patient advocacy time. This reflects a clear belief: the people who need this most are already carrying significant medical expenses and are least able to absorb concierge pricing.
The underlying framework structure is the same across all conditions. One Navigator produces a portable reference system — Signals, Priorities, Boundaries, Continuity — that transfers across conditions, providers, and care phases.
Navigator is not advocacy in the traditional sense. It does not replace clinicians, legal protections, or individualized medical advice. It does not promise diagnoses, interpret test results, or guarantee outcomes.
What it does is improve the quality of your decisions, your documentation, and your confidence inside a system that was not designed with your situation in mind. It gives you structure where the system gives you none, and helps you sustain that structure across time, not just in moments of crisis.
Scope: Navigator programs are non-clinical. They support system awareness, documentation clarity, communication strategy, and decision structure. Clinical decisions belong with licensed providers.
Safety: If symptoms are severe, new, rapidly worsening, or feel urgent, seek emergency care or urgent evaluation first. Use a Navigator after you are safe.
Navigator is built from years spent inside appointments, reviewing records, and working across specialties, not from theory. The system dynamics it addresses are those that show up repeatedly in real care settings.
Navigator helps patients move from reactive scrambling to grounded decision-making, and from isolation to a sense of internal coherence. It's for people who are doing their best inside a system that doesn't support them, and who need a structure that respects that reality.