CodaMetrix Co-Founder: The Unfair Advantage of Building Inside Mass General Brigham

Kevin Schmidt is the co-founder and Chief Solutions Officer of CodaMetrix, the autonomous medical coding platform born inside Mass General Brigham and now live in more than 30 health systems, including Mayo Clinic.

Kevin breaks down why building inside a hospital was an unfair advantage and what it cost them in speed, how autonomous coding differs from AI copilots, why a 70% drop in claim denials comes down to consistency rather than intelligence, and the uncomfortable finding behind it: two expert coders agree on the same case only 70 to 80% of the time, and the same coder agrees with themselves only 80 to 85% of the time.

Also covered: Epic moving into revenue cycle AI, why implementation is the hardest scaling problem in health tech, why the CFO is the easy sell and the coding manager is not, and where full automation is genuinely ready today.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

00:11 Born inside a hospital: the CodaMetrix origin story

07:34 Why autonomous coding instead of assisted

11:21 Could you build this today from outside a health system?

13:57 Winning customers beyond Mass General Brigham

17:15 The timeline: 2005 platform, 2014 machine learning, 2019 spinout

18:33 Why medical coding complexity is a moat

22:48 Implementation timelines and meeting customers where they are

24:27 What happens after the CFO signs

26:37 Living inside Epic workflows

30:03 The 70% reduction in claim denials

35:08 Surgical coding, quality rubrics, and inter-rater reliability

39:46 Epic moving deeper into revenue cycle

41:54 The hardest stakeholder to convince

45:24 Why general purpose AI struggles in RCM

47:00 Where full automation is ready, and where it is not

48:31 CDI: the one thing he would automate next

50:16 Selling to top academic medical centers

51:52 Risk adjustment, quality measures, and pop health

53:06 The non-consensus take on coding quality

54:43 Product to engineering to Chief Solutions Officer

58:08 Rapid fire

1:03:07 Closing

More about Codametrix & Kevin SchmittKevin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-schmitt-45497961/Codametrix Website: https://www.codametrix.com/Codametrix LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codametrix/More about Vik & Care ShiftVik's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sathvik-bilakanti-8b5344169/Care Shift LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/care-shift/?viewAsMember=trueCare Shift Website: https://careshift.vc/