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.
Through the deal, IKS gains 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.
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%.”
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.
Sehgal said that IKS is repositioning itself from a labor-heavy services company into more of an AI-enabled technology platform. This deal will help the company move away from manual processes and adopt automated workflows, with humans supervising the output rather than doing the bulk of the work themselves, he added.
In his eyes, the acquisition is about both technology and talent. He said not only do ARAI’s founders have extensive expertise in healthcare AI, but their academic ties in India are also a pipeline for recruiting elite AI talent in the future.
In the AI world, speed to market can be a major strategic plus, Sehgal pointed out. He argued that building AI expertise organically is too slow, which is why IKS has built a habit of acquiring specialized teams that can immediately help it compete in a rapidly moving market.
For instance, the company acquired AQuity and Robin Healthcare in recent years — both deals that allowed IKS to quickly gain targeted capabilities and specialized talent, Sehgal said.
“This move is very consistent with historical acquisitions that IKS has done, and we will continue to do this type of acquisition when we need top talent,” he stated.
Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin, Getty Images
