IKS Healtha Dallas-based company that sells software to healthcare providers, has acquired ARAI this week to deepen its agentic AI infrastructure and reduce its reliance on third-party AI models. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Through the affairIKS benefits from ARAI’s biomedical knowledge graphs and ontology layer. In other words, the company gets technology that organizes complex medical terminology and relationships into a format that AI systems can quickly understand, explained Ajai Sehgal, IKS’s director of AI.
He said ARAI gives IKS a large and organized body of medical knowledge that it would have taken years to build on its own. By ensuring that AI systems can better understand medical terms and coding systems, IKS seeks to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the tools.
Sehgal noted that IKS sees knowledge graphs as a way to reduce the significant costs of language models. Instead of introducing massive amounts of medical terminology and context into an LLM for each task, IKS can now use graph traversal to refine the context from the start.
For example, if a clinical note is related to dermatology, the IKS system will only retrieve dermatology-specific ontologies before sending the information to the model, Sehgal said.
“What this really does is it reduces our costs of using large language models,” he said. “If we can optimize our costs, we also optimize costs for our customers, and we make more money: spend less, make more. When I talk about cost reduction, it’s significant. It’s 80 to 90 percent.”
The acquisition supports several AI automation initiatives already underway at IKS, including coding, revenue cycle management and tracing. The idea is that knowledge graphs will soon become a fundamental infrastructure on which several IKS products will build.
Sehgal said IKS was repositioning itself from a labor-intensive services company to an AI-based technology platform. The deal will help the company move away from manual processes and adopt automated workflows, in which humans will oversee the outcome rather than doing the bulk of the work themselves, he added.
In his eyes, this acquisition is about both technology and talent. He said that not only do ARAI founders have extensive AI expertise in healthcare, but their academic ties in India also provide a pipeline for recruiting elite AI talent in the future.
In the world of AI, speed to market can be a major strategic asset, Sehgal noted. He argued that organically developing AI expertise is too slow, which is why IKS has made a habit of acquiring specialized teams that can immediately help it compete in a rapidly changing market.
For example, the company acquired AQuity and Robin Healthcare in recent years – two transactions that allowed IKS to quickly acquire targeted capabilities and specialized talent, Sehgal said.
“This decision is entirely consistent with the historic acquisitions made by IKS, and we will continue to make this type of acquisition when we need the best talent,” he said.
Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin, Getty Images
