Why We’re Joining R1 – and What It Means for the Future of Prior Auth

‍Today marks a huge milestone: Humata Health is joining R1. 

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When we started this journey, we knew fixing prior authorization was a mission worth fighting for – and we’ve taken that work further than I ever could have imagined. 

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As a practicing radiologist, I watched patient care get delayed for weeks while my team wrestled with stacks of faxes. What started a decade ago as a small group of us taking on healthcare’s most unglamorous problem eventually grew into Humata Health. Our mission has always been simple: to eliminate administrative friction on both sides of the fax machine and ensure patients get timely access to appropriate care. 

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We’ve made huge strides toward making that a reality. We deployed enterprise-grade technology with major health systems, helping millions of patients, and partnered with CMS to bring rapid approvals to Medicare beneficiaries. Every milestone was driven by the same unwavering belief that prior authorization should never stand in the way of necessary care.

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Why R1, and Why Now?

We’ve always believed that truly fixing prior authorization requires bridging the gap between payers and providers. We’ve also always believed that prior authorization is the key bottleneck intimately tied into the entire revenue cycle - and linking our solution to the entire process will unlock massive value. And most importantly we want to impact patients on a national scale.

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R1 brings over two decades of operational leadership across the country's top health systems. By integrating Humata’s technology directly into R1’s Phare OS, we are bringing our connected payer-provider model to an unprecedented footprint—bridging the gap from scheduling all the way to through claim adjudication.

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Together, this combination unlocks key capabilities the market desperately needs:

• Real-Time Adjudication & Payer Bridge: Connects provider requests directly to payer decision engines and claims processing, giving health systems upfront payment certainty.
• Smarter Clinical Intelligence: Uses rich clinical data to strengthen downstream coding precision, enhance documentation, and prevent denials before they happen.
• Frictionless Care for Patients: Unifies siloed workflows to eliminate the administrative lag that delays treatment and burns out care teams.

Humata — the name, the mission, and our entire team — continues on exactly as it is. What changes is our reach. Under the R1 umbrella, we’re excited to work alongside an incredible team to transform the entire revenue cycle and tie it all together. 

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At the end of the day, this has never been about just technology alone. It’s about a doctor getting to be a doctor again, and a patient getting appropriate care without administrative friction standing in the way.

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In the Arena 

My favorite president, Teddy Roosevelt, famously wrote that the credit belongs to the person "who is actually in the arena… who spends themselves in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement."

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That credit belongs to the doctors, nurses, and staff fighting every day to care for their patients – and to the Humata team, who dared to take on healthcare’s toughest challenge when few believed it could be solved.

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To everyone in the arena with us: thank you for believing in this mission. Today, we step into this next chapter with full hearts, deeply grateful for how far we've come, and more committed than ever to finishing what we started.

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Onward, upward, and always built for yes.

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