| The deal
IKS Health, a Dallas-based company that sells software to healthcare providers, acquired ARAI this week to deepen its agentic AI infrastructure and decrease its reliance on third-party AI models. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. What does IKS gain?
IKS is gaining ARAI’s biomedical knowledge graphs and ontology layer. In other words, the company is obtaining technology that organizes complex medical terminology and relationships into a format that AI systems can quickly understand, explained Ajai Sehgal, IKS’ chief AI officer. He said ARAI gives IKS a large, organized body of medical knowledge that would have taken years to build on its own. By making sure AI systems can better understand medical terms and coding systems, IKS is seeking to improve the accuracy and efficiency of tools. The acquisition supports several AI automation initiatives already underway at IKS, including coding, revenue cycle management and scribing. The idea is that the knowledge graphs will soon become foundational infrastructure powering multiple IKS products. Reducing costs
Sehgal noted that IKS sees knowledge graphs as a way to reduce large language model costs. Instead of feeding massive amounts of medical terminology and context into an LLM for every task, IKS can now use graph traversal to narrow down the context off the bat. For example, if a clinical note is dermatology-related, IKS system will only retrieve dermatology-specific ontologies before sending information to the model, Sehgal stated. “What this really does is it reduces our cost to use large language models,” he declared. “If we can optimize our cost, we optimize the cost for our clients as well, and we make more money — spend less, make more. When I'm talking about cost reduction, it's significant. It's 80-90%.” — By Katie Adams |
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