Case Study — Nexora

Payer Claims Analytics & Fraud Triage

Cutting Fraudulent Claims Payout by $6M Annually Through AI-Assisted Claims Triage

AI agents scoring and routing high-risk claims before payment, not after

Industry

Regional Health Insurance Payer

Timeline

14 weeks

Team

6 engineers

Tech

Multi-Agent Orchestration + ML Scoring + PostgreSQL

The Challenge

A regional health insurance payer processing 4TB of claims data annually had no systematic way to flag suspicious claims before payment — fraud investigation was entirely reactive, triggered by post-payment audits sampling less than 2% of claims. Investigators were reviewing flagged claims months after payout, when recovery was difficult and evidence was stale, while an estimated $8M in fraudulent or erroneous claims was paid out annually.

Our Approach

How We Solved It

01

Claims Ingestion & Feature Extraction

Built a pipeline that extracts risk-relevant features from every incoming claim — provider billing patterns, procedure-diagnosis consistency, patient utilization history — in real time as claims arrive, not in a nightly batch.

02

Fraud Risk Scoring Agent

Trained a scoring agent on 3 years of confirmed fraud and audit outcomes that assigns every claim a risk score before adjudication, replacing the fixed 2% random-sample audit approach.

03

Investigator Triage Queue

High-risk claims are automatically routed to a prioritized investigator queue with the specific risk factors that triggered the flag surfaced alongside the claim — not just a score, but the reasoning.

04

Provider Pattern Analytics

Built a provider-level analytics view that aggregates risk signals across a provider's full claims history, surfacing systemic billing patterns individual claim review would miss.

Engineering Process

How We Built It

Real-Time Feature Pipeline

Claims features are computed as claims are submitted, not in a nightly batch, so high-risk claims can be flagged for review before payment rather than after.

Explainable Risk Scoring

The scoring agent outputs the specific contributing risk factors alongside its score, not a black-box number, since investigators need a documented rationale to justify claim holds and any resulting provider action.

Feedback Loop From Investigation Outcomes

Every investigator determination — confirmed fraud, false positive, insufficient evidence — feeds back into the scoring model's training set, so the model's precision improves as the investigation team works.

Architecture Decisions

Key Technical Choices

Score-and-Route, Not Auto-Deny

The system flags and routes for human investigation; it never automatically denies a claim. This kept clinical and financial liability decisions with licensed claims staff, a requirement from the payer's legal and compliance teams.

Provider-Level Aggregation as a Separate Layer

Provider pattern analytics run as a separate aggregation layer from per-claim scoring, since systemic provider fraud requires a different detection approach than isolated claim errors.

Audit-Grade Logging for Every Flag

Every risk flag, its contributing factors, and the resulting investigator decision are retained in an immutable log — required both for internal audit and to defend provider actions if disputed.

Results

What We Delivered

$6M
Annual Fraud Payout Reduction
4TB/yr
Claims Data Processed
2% → 18%
Claims Receiving Risk-Based Review
89%
Investigator-Confirmed Flag Precision

Solution Blueprint

How It All Fits Together

Data Layer
  • Real-time claims feature pipeline
  • 3-year fraud/audit training history
  • Provider billing pattern store
Scoring Layer
  • Explainable fraud risk scoring agent
  • Provider-level pattern analytics
  • Investigator feedback loop
Operations Layer
  • Investigator triage queue
  • Provider action dashboard
  • Immutable audit log

Lessons Learned

What We Improved

01

Explainability Was Not Optional

The compliance team rejected the first black-box scoring model outright. Rebuilding it to surface contributing factors was what got it approved for production use.

02

Feedback Loops Compound Fast

Model precision improved measurably within the first quarter once investigator outcomes started feeding back into training — the biggest gains came from the cases the model got wrong, not right.

03

2% Random Sampling Was Hiding the Real Problem

Moving from random-sample audits to risk-based review surfaced systemic provider billing patterns the old approach had never had the coverage to detect.

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