Solving for Tomorrow: Tales from the Tech Frontier

Coding, Claims & Clinical Care: Automating the Future of Medicine

Episode Summary

In this episode, Brian chats with Spencer Schaefer, Chief Technology (AI) Officer at Lunar Analytics.

Episode Notes

In this episode, Brian talks with Dr. Spencer Schaefer, CTO of Lunar Analytics and former Chief AI Officer for a federal agency, about deploying agentic AI to solve some of healthcare’s most entrenched challenges. With 25+ years at the VA and deep experience across clinical informatics, enterprise architecture, and AI governance, Spencer now leads innovation in automated claims processing, agentic orchestration, and AI-powered decision systems.

The conversation explores:

The technical architecture behind multi-agent AI models in healthcare
How agentic systems extract clinical data with contextual accuracy
Why prompt engineering and semantic control matter for reliability
How agent-based claims automation can recover billions of dollars in lost revenue
The barriers to adoption: regulation, leadership inertia, and trust

Spencer shares how his team used open-source models and internal compute to prototype agentic systems capable of transforming both medical workflows and administrative overhead, without compromising care.

In the Post Fix, Brian and Harriet break down the future of patient surrogates:

What does it mean to have an AI managing your healthcare interactions
How LLM reasoning works behind the scenes
And why transparency, governance, and incentives will shape adoption

This episode is a must-listen for healthcare CTOs, AI architects, policy leaders, and anyone building enterprise systems where accuracy, context, and trust are mission-critical.

Time Stamps:

*(01:08) Rapid Fire
*(09:00) Inside Agentic AI: Definitions, RAG, and LLM Training
*(15:35) How VA Teams Built Multi-Agent AI Systems
*(31:00) The Issue Around Hallucinations
*(40:55) Billing Bots and the $1.2 Trillion Opportunity
*(58:00) Looking For 10-Year Outlooks to Solve a Problem
*(1:15:40) The Agentic Health Future
*(1:28:23) The Post-Fix

--------

Solving for Tomorrow is sponsored by Geisel Software. We help you create products that seamlessly automate the physical and virtual worlds using robotics, machine learning, and so much more. Find out more at geisel.software.