Shane Francis · Carlsbad, California
I work where healthcare economics, public policy and applied AI meet—turning research into decisions, and ideas into working software.
Economist by training. Builder by practice.
A path through public service, healthcare strategy and independent product development.
01 / Selected work
I connect the financial picture, the policy context and the tools people need to act.
UnitedHealth Group · 2022–2026
Built market-sizing models using plan enrollment, per-member economics, survey findings and product constraints. The work included payment-integrity products, strategy consultations and materials that helped teams explain the opportunity.
Louisiana & Alaska · 2017–2022
In Louisiana, established independent Medicaid cost and caseload conferences and produced legislative fiscal notes. In Alaska, modeled state health-benefit changes and investigated retiree drug-subsidy calculations.
UnitedHealth Group & Simulacra · 2022–present
Built an Azure-based product-sizing assistant for Microsoft Teams at UHG. At Simulacra, I develop applications that combine language models, retrieval and persistent narrative memory with the everyday mechanics of an operating product.
02 / Independent projects
Different questions, shared curiosity about what people and machines can make together.
Creative software / In development
Creative fiction with language models. An application exploring persistent characters, narrative memory and the systems that support ongoing stories.
Visit Simulacra ↗Independent experiment / Pilot
An experiment comparing an expert working with AI against an autonomous agent, using shared context and a blind human review process.
Explore the experiment ↗03 / Background
My work has moved from state healthcare economics to national payer strategy and independent AI applications. Across those settings, I’ve kept returning to the same challenge: making complicated information useful to the people making decisions.
Read my professional profile ↗2026 — Present
2022 — 2026
2021 — 2022
2017 — 2020
Let’s compare notes
Research, strategy, product development and thoughtful collaboration.