Administrative costs currently make up more than 40% of U.S. hospital expenses, with over $160 billion spent on Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) alone every single year, which assists healthcare providers with billing patients, tracking payments, and collecting money.
Like many facets of the healthcare space, RCM is being aided by artificial intelligence, which can automate tasks and increase accuracy. For example, AI can automate repetitive tasks like claim processing, eligibility verification, and authorizations, while analyzing large datasets to identify errors and inconsistencies, leading to more accurate claims submissions and reduced denials.
On Friday, RCM company R1 announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies to launch a new AI lab, called R37, which the companies say is “dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare financial performance.”
The partnership will bring together R1’s expertise in payer-provider dynamics and technology capabilities with Palantir’s AI tools so that the lab can develop intelligent automation solutions for processes that include coding, billing, and denials management.
R1 currently serves 94 of the top 100 U.S. health systems and has been supporting automated revenue cycle workflows with a repository of structured and unstructured RCM data, which includes over 180 million annual payer transactions, 550 million annual patient encounters, 20,000 proprietary payment algorithms, and 1.2 billion annual workflow actions.
R37 has already been in operation for the past few months, producing AI-powered agentic applications; R1 says it expects to deploy ‘agentic RCM worker’ solutions to a group of enterprise customers in the second half of next year.
“R1 brings unmatched ambition to an area of healthcare that desperately needs it,” Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, said in a statement.
“By embedding our engineers directly within R1’s operations, we can rapidly scale intelligent automation and drive measurable impact at speed—ultimately enabling providers to focus on delivering better patient care.”
(Image source: r1rcm.com)
