Healthcare tech company H1 picked up Ribbon Health, a provider data management software company to broaden its reach into the health plan, provider system and digital health sectors.
The transaction, which closed in late December, was a mix of cash and stock, according to H1 executives. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Ribbon Health’s platform will join the H1 family of products as H1 for Health Plans and Digital Health, providing insurers, providers and digital health companies with real-time provider data, executives said.
H1, a tech platform hosting healthcare provider profiles for life science customers, acts as both a professional database and an analytics service.
Ribbon Health was founded in 2016 to disrupt a long history of industry challenges with provider data. The company developed an API platform for real-time access to a nationwide provider and health plan directory, covering demographic, network, cost, quality and other actionable information.
Ariel Katz, CEO and co-founder of H1, said Ribbon Health and H1 "have the same mission."
"Our mission is to connect the world to the right doctor. They were doing it for patients. We were doing it for pharma," Katz said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
Roughly 20 million to 25 million individuals in the U.S. every year use Ribbon Health to find a provider, according to Katz.
"Ribbon, via their customers, who are health plans as well as digital health companies, were using Ribbon's data to power their 'Find Care' use case, such as when a patient or member searches for the right doctor for them," he said. "They use the same information that pharma uses to find the doctor. If you are Eli Lilly or Pfizer and you're trying to find the right investigator for a study, what do you look for? What's their specialty? Where do they work? Where do they spend most of their time? What do their patients look like? What language they speak? Are they good at what they do? What's their expertise? How do they compare to their peers?"
With the acquisition, H1 is doubling down on its vision to connect patients with accurate, relevant information about providers, Katz said.
"The vision is, in three to five years, me and Nate said this Sunday, when in three to five years, we want to help over 200 million Americans every year find the right doctor," he said.
"For the Ribbon customers, we are giving them all of the H1 data included, which is very powerful, particularly for these 20 million Americans that use it," he added.
"They're now going to have all the information on race and ethnicity of the providers, the languages the provider speaks, the race and ethnicity of their patient population and socioeconomic factors of their patient population. Knowing if a doctor sees patients that make $50K and $75k that are all Hispanic, and the doctor speaks Spanish seems important to know if you speak Spanish. All of that is going to be flowing into the Ribbon platform. The most important thing is to make sure that we improve the experience of the Ribbon customers and improve patients' experience," Katz said.
H1 wants to make it easier for patients to know which provider accepts their insurance and is in their referral network and to book appointments. "We have the data and information to make it easier," Katz said.
Ribbon Health founders Nate Maslak and Nate Fox were motivated to start the company based on their own challenges navigating the healthcare system. They wanted to build a platform that made it simpler to find care.
Ribbon Health, a Fierce 15 of 2023 honoree, raised $75 million, according to Katz, and investors included General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Core Innovation Capital and Y Combinator.
“From the moment Ariel and I first met, it was clear that Ribbon and H1 were destined to collaborate. Our platforms—and our visions—mesh perfectly,” Maslak said in a statement. “By combining our comprehensive provider data and provider data management software with H1’s clinical insights and global reach, we’re giving individuals the information they need to get the best possible care.”
The company has more than 50 customers, "tens of millions" in revenue and has reached "significant scale," Katz noted.
"Investors are happy with the acquisition. It was an incredibly competitive process that we were battling quite a few parties to make sure that we were the best suitor and fiercely competitive. There were a lot of people around the table," he said.
Katz and Ian Sax founded H1 in 2017 based on the idea of developing a platform to connect healthcare professionals to help pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies develop drugs and devices. The company has developed a massive digital professional database and data analytics platform that connects healthcare professionals and life science companies. It basically serves as a LinkedIn for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
H1 has raised $193 million to-date and is profitable, Katz said.
Along with the acquisition news, H1 also unveiled a 2025 product roadmap address the evolving needs of its customers and the market.
The company streamlined its solutions for the life sciences industry and launched new offerings within those products. H1 for Medical is designed to help medical affairs teams identify and engage key opinion leaders to promote adherence to evidence-based medicine.
H1 for Clinical supports clinical teams in identifying sites, principal investigators and participants while advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the trial process.
H1 for Commercial accelerates patient access by facilitating the development and successful launch of new medical therapies and technologies.
The company also announced former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, M.D., is joining its board of directors.
Hahn is a physician, scientist and healthcare leader with expertise in oncology, clinical research and executive leadership. He was the chief medical executive at MD Anderson Cancer Center. As FDA Commissioner from 2019-2021 under the Trump administration, he oversaw regulatory affairs for COVID-19 and non-COVID-related areas. He currently serves as CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering and CEO of Harbinger Health.
Hahn brings that broad expertise from the regulatory side as well as the provider side to H1's leadership team.
H1 also is eyeing future M&A opportunities. "We are very much open for business. Anything that fits the mission, we'll say yes to, if it makes sense financially," Katz said.
The company has been diving deeper into artificial intelligence capabilities. In 2023, it added GenosAI to its clinical trials arm, Trial Landscape. The tech is described as incorporating a “ChatGPT-like” experience into Trial Landscape, which clients use to help establish new clinical trials.
In early 2024, H1 rolled out the latest addition to its conversational AI toolkit, dubbed GenosAI Pro, that can transform text and data into visual insights for the preparation of diversity plans, healthcare provider and site biobooks, and presentation slides.