If you've ever built a batch RAF job, you know the awkward truth: by the time the score lands, the encounter that produced it is long over. The interesting engineering challenge is moving that calculation from a nightly batch to a real-time, event-driven service. Here's how I think about the architecture.
What we're computing
The Risk Adjustment Factor (RAF) is built from demographic factors plus clinical conditions expressed as Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCCs), each weighted by a coefficient under CMS-HCC V28. The math itself is simple addition. The hard part is doing it as data arrives, deterministically, with an audit trail.
For the conceptual background on why real-time scoring improves accuracy, this writeup on how RAF score automation works is a good companion read.
Event-driven, not batch
