H1 has acquired Defacto Health, a healthcare data company focused on provider network intelligence, in a move to expand its offerings for health plans and strengthen its healthcare data assets.
H1 is an AI-powered platform that brings healthcare data, domain expertise and an artificial intelligence platform to life science companies. The company built an AI-powered platform that helps identify and engage the right doctors for critical workflows across pharma, health plan, health system and technology companies.
Defacto Health is an AI-driven provider intelligence platform that aggregates and analyzes health insurance payer networks, provider directories and medical demographics data. The company maintains data on payer networks, healthcare providers and the insurance plans providers accept, helping health plans assess directory accuracy, isolate error clusters and benchmark their networks.
The transaction was a mix of cash and stock, according to H1 executives. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
The two companies have been longstanding partners, making the acquisition a natural extension of their relationship, according to Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO of H1, in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
The acquisition brings a longtime H1 data partner into the company and strengthens H1’s investment in the connected, high-quality healthcare data customers use to understand providers, networks and access to care. Defacto will operate as part of H1, with co-founders Ron Urwongse and Tarun J. Theogaraj joining H1.
It marks H1's third acquisition in the past two years. In early 2025, the company picked up provider data management software company Ribbon Health to broaden its reach into the health plan, provider system and digital health sectors. Later in 2025, the healthcare tech company acquired Veda Data Solutions to build out its provider data and automation solutions for payers.
There is strong demand for H1’s doctor intelligence, Katz said, and the company’s accurate doctor information is crucial for AI companies and large healthcare entities like CVS Health.
The company boasts that it has one of the most comprehensive global datasets of healthcare professionals and its platform combines deep healthcare data with agentic AI workflows to power critical workflows across drug development, medical and commercial engagement, care navigation, and provider data and network intelligence.
"This acquisition sticks to the mission of connecting the world to the right doctor," Katz said. The Ribbon Health acquisition expanded H1's real-world provider data to help patients access accurate provider information through digital health apps. After acquiring Veda, the company's reach expanded significantly through provider directories used by several of the nation's largest health plans, increasing its footprint across the insured population.
The company claims that 85% of the top 20 pharma companies and 9 out of 10 of the top health plans are customers.
In May, CVS Health Ventures backed a $40 million investment in H1 following a collaboration with the healthcare company on several projects. H1 is working with CVS on a joint strategic AI roadmap that includes an AI model to improve CVS Health’s healthcare provider directory.
"We have seen every major health plan using us and we touch almost all Americans who have insurance where they're using us to find a doctor. But the number one complaint—literally 50% of our support tickets—is patients asking, what insurance do they accept? If I go get this MRI, do they accept this insurance? It's half of our support tickets," Katz said. "So, we thought this was a core competency that we needed to get better at. And although we were licensing the data from Defacto, there is more that we could do together to solve this problem."
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also is cracking down on so-called "ghost networks," inaccurate or inactive provider listings. In a final rule issued last September, Medicare Advantage organizations must attest to the accuracy of the provider directory data they provide to CMS to populate online.
At H1, Urwongse and Theogaraj bring longstanding experience in provider data and interoperability, according to H1. Before founding Defacto, both led provider-data work at CAQH. Urwongse managed provider data and interoperability solutions, while Theogaraj managed provider data solutions and later led product work for CAQH’s flagship provider data platform.
“Provider and payer data is complex, dynamic, and foundational to so many healthcare decisions,” Urwongse said in a statement. “We built Defacto to make provider network information more accurate, accessible, and useful. Joining H1 gives our team the opportunity to invest further in that work and apply it within a broader healthcare intelligence platform that helps organizations connect with the right doctors.”
"Health plans are under continued pressure to maintain accurate provider directories while managing information that changes constantly across providers, facilities, plans, and networks. Bringing Defacto into H1 continues to strengthen the data foundation behind our platform and helps us continue to provide health plans and their industry partners with the tools and intelligence they need to understand their networks, identify inaccuracies, and make better-informed decisions," Katz said.
As consumers turn to AI-based chatbots to search for providers, H1 is increasingly powering that experience, according to Katz. The company is also working with life sciences companies to scale AI-driven clinical trials. It inked a partnership with Novo Nordisk to develop proprietary AI-driven clinical trial development workflows and data.
"We are using our technology and data to help infuse AI across the entire clinical trial design workflow of Novo Nordisk. We're helping them design clinical trials, draft protocols, pick which countries they're doing clinical trials, pick the hospitals, pick the doctors, forecast budgets and cost of clinical trials, forecast how long it's going to take to complete the clinical trial, with the goal to reduce cycle time, make it go quicker by years," Katz said.
H1 will also acquire rights to further advance StudyHub, a digital and AI-enabled platform for clinical development built by Novo Nordisk.