CHICAGO, Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- R1 (“R1” or the “Company”), an industry leader in healthcare revenue management, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Humata Health (“Humata”), a leader in AI-powered, touchless prior authorizations. The transaction marks a significant step in advancing R1’s strategy to comprehensively automate the revenue cycle through its Phare Operating System (“Phare OS”), expanding the platform’s AI-powered capabilities while helping providers reduce administrative complexity, increase reimbursement accuracy, and improve financial outcomes.
Prior authorizations are a top-three driver of denials and a frequent source of frustration for health systems, clinicians, and patients. A recent KFF survey found that one-third of insured adults identified prior authorization as the biggest burden faced when accessing healthcare, particularly for individuals with chronic health conditions. 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.
R1’s Phare OS is a comprehensive automation platform that prioritizes pre-bill workflows for authorization, utilization review, documentation, and coding. It utilizes an AI-first architecture to prevent downstream denials and optimize reimbursement before claims are submitted. 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. 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.
Humata Health is a leading health tech company dedicated to making prior authorization seamless for health systems, payers, and the patients they serve. With agentic workflows that intelligently match policies and connect to payers in real-time, its proprietary, end-to-end solution simplifies and accelerates every step of the medical review process. It determines requirement logic, creates AI-driven clinical bundles, provides evidence for payer attestations, and manages requests through final approval across all specialties. Humata’s solution allows providers to achieve up to a 96% first-pass approval rate while reducing write-offs by 30%, rescheduled appointments by 83%, and staff touches by 45%, delivering lower costs and friction for payers and providers, while ensuring patients gain faster access to care.
Following the closing of the transaction, expected to occur by the end of the third quarter, the Humata team will enhance R1’s R37 innovation lab, 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.
“Today’s announcement marks an important step forward in our journey to automate the revenue cycle and make real-time authorizations a near-term reality,” said Joe Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer of R1. “Humata significantly enhances our coverage of the authorization process, advancing our strategy to have the most intelligent and integrated pre-bill architecture in the industry. Together, we will continue to shape the future of revenue cycle management and help deliver better outcomes for the patients, providers, and health systems we serve.”
“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 Jeremy Friese, MD, Founder and CEO of Humata Health. “Fixing this broken process is urgent. By joining forces with R1 and its 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.”
About R1
R1 is a leader in healthcare revenue management, helping providers achieve new levels of performance through smart orchestration. A pioneer in the industry, R1 created the first Healthcare Revenue Operating System: a modular, intelligent platform that integrates automation, AI, and human expertise to strengthen the entire revenue cycle. With more than 20 years of experience, R1 partners with 1,000 providers, including 95 of the top 100 U.S. health systems, and handles over 600 million payer transactions annually. This scale provides unmatched operational insight to help healthcare organizations unlock greater long-term value. To learn more, visit: r1rcm.com.
About Humata Health
Humata Health is a leader in AI-powered, touchless prior authorizations. A health tech company “Built for Yes,” its mission is to make prior authorization easy and seamless for providers, payers and the patients they serve. With the industry’s largest ecosystem of integrations and proprietary technology that gathers the right clinical information required for fast approval, the Humata platform is the only truly end-to-end prior authorization solution for all services and procedures. Humata is a physician-led company that is backed by a syndicate of strategic healthcare investors including Blue Venture Fund, Sandbox Clinical Venture Fund, LRVHealth, .406 Ventures and Highmark Ventures. Lazard served as exclusive financial advisor to Humata for this transaction.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events, plans, or performance. These statements are based on current expectations, assumptions, and information available to R1’s management and are not guarantees of future results. Actual outcomes may differ materially due to uncertainties, risks, and changing circumstances, including but not limited to operational challenges, market dynamics, and other unforeseen events. All forward-looking statements are provided as of the date of this release, and R1 assumes no obligation to update them, except as required by law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements.
Contact
R1
Mike Gilhooly
Director of Public Relations and Communications
media@r1rcm.com
