Healthcare revenue management company R1 is acquiring Humata Health, a company focused on AI-powered prior authorizations. 

The acquisition is another step in Chicago-based R1’s effort to automate the revenue cycle through its Phare Operating System (“Phare OS”). The company says it partners with 1,000 providers and handles more than 600 million payer transactions each year. 

R1 notes that staying up to date on frequently changing prior authorization policies is challenging, and securing authorizations typically requires significant manual effort for healthcare providers and payers.

Winter Park, Fla.-based Humata was founded in 2023 by industry veteran and serial entrepreneur, Jeremy Friese, M.D., who served as an interventional radiologist and physician leader at Mayo Clinic for many years before founding Verata Health, a venture-backed AI technology company that was acquired by Olive in 2020. At Olive he served as president, Payer Market.
 
Here is how R1 sees the fit between the two companies: R1’s Phare OS is pre-bill-focused, using AI-powered agentic workflows to prevent downstream denials and optimize reimbursement before claims are submitted. Humata enhances those capabilities by extending Phare OS further upstream with the addition of authorization-specific clinical and payer intelligence. Humata’s authorization policy monitoring and agentic capabilities for autonomously creating effective authorization submissions will directly enhance Phare Intelligence and Payer Atlas, the foundation of Phare OS, the company said. 

R1 added that Phare OS customers will also benefit from the ability to deploy additional modules, including Audit and Denials, with minimal incremental data integration. In addition, this strengthens the ability for Phare OS to support deeper collaboration between payers and providers, moving the industry closer to real-time authorizations.

Following the closing of the transaction, expected to occur by the end of the third quarter, the Humata team will join R1’s R37 innovation lab to become part of R1’s agentic AI development team. R1 plans to connect Humata’s technology to Phare OS, accelerating AI-powered automation across the revenue cycle and supporting Humata’s ability to scale and serve its growing pipeline.

“As a physician, I’ve seen firsthand how prior authorization delays drain providers and push an already strained healthcare system to a breaking point,” said Humata CEO Jeremy Friese, M.D., in a statement. “Fixing this broken process is urgent. By joining forces with R1 and their visionary R37 innovation lab, we can bring our prior authorization capabilities into the Phare OS platform, combining advanced AI and upstream intelligence with downstream execution to finally eliminate administrative friction for providers, payers, and patients.”