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Rajaie Batniji

Co-Founder and CEO, Waymark · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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Dr. Rajaie Batniji is an internal medicine physician and entrepreneur who co-founded Waymark, which uses machine learning and community care teams to improve outcomes for Medicaid beneficiaries. Previously, he co-founded Collective Health and served as its Chief Health Officer.

9statements → 4claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 2.56/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

3 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 3 opinions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Rajaie argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Batniji: Standard Medicaid algorithms identify high-cost patients too late to help
“If you look at those high cost claimants, and you look at the algorithms that are used to identify them, there's a couple of very common ones, By the time they identify a patient, that patient's cost, and this is according to the National Medicaid Database, wh…”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 18:33 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
83% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Rajaie Batniji said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Batniji: Standard Medicaid algorithms identify high-cost patients too late to help
“If you look at those high cost claimants, and you look at the algorithms that are used to identify them, there's a couple of very common ones, By the time they identify a patient, that patient's cost, and this is according to the National Medicaid Database, wh…”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 18:33 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Assertion Supported
Batniji: Waymark's ML model boosts acute care prediction accuracy to 90%
“If you didn't have signal, you'd have about 30% accuracy in identifying Future acute care use. I mean, seven out of the 10 patients that you reach out to, you're not going to actually benefit in a way that changes the outcome. With Signal, you have 90% accurac…”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 24:00 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Opinion
Batniji: Withholding Waymark's intervention would be medical malpractice if a drug
“I think the biggest difference is that if this were a drug, it'd be medical malpractice not to give it.”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 26:38 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Opinion
Batniji: Superficial value-based care agreements impede Medicaid delivery reform
“And I think that's actually been one of the biggest, like, challenges and impediments to adopting non-fee-for-service models in Medicaid is You know, the default mentality is, you know, if there is a value-based flag planted somewhere, then that territory is c…”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 28:37 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Opinion
Batniji: Medicaid is US healthcare's largest and most addressable challenge
“All of the creativity, all the capital is going into largely Medicare and employer. And Medicaid is actually the biggest, and frankly, I think the most readily addressed challenge in, in US healthcare. And there was very little happening to take that on.”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 4:32 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Assertion Partly supported
Batniji: 39% of Medicaid acute care is avoidable, triple commercial rates
“40% of all acute care or 39% of all acute care in Medicaid is avoidable. That's like three times what it is in Medicare, three times what it is in commercial.”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 6:48 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Assertion Supported
Batniji: Waymark reduced Medicaid acute care by 23% and hospitalizations by 48%
“Reducing overall acute care in the intervene cohort by 23%, reducing what are called ambulatory care sensitive hospitalizations by 48%.”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 16:30 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Insight
Batniji: Missing software and funding models prevented community healthcare from scaling
“The challenge is nobody had ever built the product to reliably implement those proven interventions at scale, and nobody had ever created the funding mechanism to make those sustainable.”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 7:41 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Disclosure
Batniji: Waymark trains risk models on clinical and social data
“Our algorithm is, is trained not on cost or prior utilization, but on condition and social risk factors, and the various other data feeds that tell us about behavior, the kind of admission discharge transfer feeds, we can see whether they're picking up their m…”
Rajaie Batniji Mar 20, 2025 ▶ 19:16 Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah

The other half of the tape: Rajaie Batniji's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Dr. Justin Larkin 2

Every mention by year

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0112022episodes it came up in
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2022 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah Mar 20, 2025 10m
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