R1 Announces Strategic Partnership with Sierra to Revolutionize AI-Driven Experiences in Healthcare
MURRAY, Utah, Oct. 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- R1 (“R1” or the “Company”), the leader in healthcare revenue management, today announced a strategic partnership with Sierra, the leading AI-powered customer experience platform. This partnership supports R1’s broader strategy to comprehensively automate the revenue cycle by leveraging cutting-edge AI. Together, R1 and Sierra intend to enhance the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of stakeholder conversations across the healthcare revenue management ecosystem.
Co-founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, Sierra’s AI platform delivers comprehensive enterprise agentic customer experience solutions across both voice and chat. Sierra’s technologies are focused on offering brand specific, human-centric AI agents at scale.
R1’s partnership with Sierra builds on the launch of its R37 AI lab and agreement to acquire Phare Health, a leading AI revenue cycle company. As R1 seeks to automate the revenue cycle through the scaled application of AI technologies, Sierra will serve as R1’s preferred partner for AI-enabled conversations. R1 manages over 40 million calls a year to and from both patients and payers. Sierra will help digitize and streamline this process. Through this partnership, R1 will leverage its scale and revenue cycle management expertise to train and instruct Sierra’s customizable AI agents to create an improved and more unified patient experience across revenue cycle touchpoints.
“In just the last year, R1 has made exceptional progress against our goal to apply AI across the entire revenue cycle and create a comprehensive AI-enabled ecosystem to improve healthcare reimbursement,” said Joe Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer of R1. “Partnering with Sierra will allow R1 to enhance our communication capabilities, ensuring that we continue to lead the market in providing innovative, AI-enabled solutions that improve the healthcare experience for providers, patients and payers. Voice technology plays a critical role in improving outcomes in our industry, and we look forward to applying Sierra’s best-in-class technology to the work our team already has underway.”
“We feel privileged to work with R1. The company plays a pivotal role in our health system and shares our view that the integration of AI will drive better customer experiences,” said Bret Taylor, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sierra. “The deeper we’ve gotten into this partnership, the clearer the opportunity to transform the business of healthcare has become. AI will meaningfully improve the quality and efficiency of the revenue management system in healthcare, and R1 has the scale and know-how to deliver the greatest benefit across all participants.”
About R1
R1 is a leading provider of automation solutions that transform financial performance and patient experience for health systems, hospitals, and physician groups. R1’s flexible, proven and scalable partnership models seamlessly complement a healthcare organization’s operations, quickly driving sustainable improvements to net patient revenue and cash flows while driving revenue yield, reducing operating costs, and enhancing the patient experience. To learn more, visit: https://www.r1rcm.com.
About Sierra
Sierra is an omnichannel AI-based communication company that specializes in creating seamless, natural language interactions. As a leader in AI communications and customer experience, Sierra is committed to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of communication across various industries. To learn more, visit: https://sierra.ai/
Contacts
R1
Eliza Rothstein / Madeline Jones
Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher
212-355-4449
R1RCM-JF@joelefrank.com
Will Reilly
VP, Marketing
media@r1rcm.com
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