C3.ai lands contract with US Health and Human Services Department
C3.ai (AI) has been selected by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as its new enterprise AI platform, the company announced last week.
The company, which is also known as C3 AI, will be providing the government with a scalable, unified and secure data foundation that will be utilized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The contract with the government was a much-needed victory for C3 AI, as its stock has been on an extended losing streak. Its shares are down 59.8% over the past year and 56.2% YTD.
The company said that as part of its work with the HHS, it will integrate disease-specific NIH data enclaves with Medicare, Medicaid, claims and state registry datasets.
HHS will be utilizing the C3 Agentic AI platform to improve its data quality and governance, as well as to enable new research, analytics and applications.
C3 AI noted that its agentic platform is also enforcing strict privacy and security requirements.
“HHS is taking a major step toward a modern, AI-ready architecture for national health data,” C3 AI CEO Stephen Ehikian said in a statement.
“The C3 Agentic AI Platform is built to unify large, complex systems at federal scale. By providing a secure, transparent, and interoperable foundation, we are enabling HHS to accelerate biomedical discovery, strengthen program integrity, and improve public health outcomes for millions of Americans.”
The company will be collaborating on the initiative with Fleet Health, a data and research firm that partners with federal agencies and health systems.
“At Fleet Health, we believe data can save lives,” Fleet Health CEO Nabeel Qureshi said in a statement. “Our collaboration with C3 AI brings together advanced AI capabilities and high-fidelity real-world data in a partnership built on a zero-trust framework.
This effort is designed to deliver research-ready health data that supports critical national programs and population health initiatives."
The deal with C3 AI comes as the HHS released a broad AI Strategy on Thursday, which is an initiative that will make "artificial intelligence available to the federal workforce, integrating it across internal operations, research, and public health."
The strategy includes five pillars that will focus on governance and risk management, user needs, workforce development and efficiency growth, health research and reproducibility, and public health delivery modernization.
The strategy is being led by Clark Minor, acting chief artificial intelligence officer for the HHS.
"AI has the potential to revolutionize health care and human services, and HHS is leading that paradigm shift," Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of HHS said in a statement.
"By guiding innovation toward patient-focused outcomes, this Administration has the potential to deliver historic wins for the public—wins that lead to longer, healthier lives."
C3 AI said that HHS will also be using its agentic AI platform to automate complex, labor-intensive workflows.
The company released its fiscal second-quarter earnings last week, with Ehikian noting in a press release that the “federal market continues to be a large growth vector for us.”
C3 AI reported an adjusted earnings per share loss of 16 cents, beating Wall Street's expectation of a loss of 20 cents per share. It also delivered $108.7 million in revenue for the quarter, topping analyst expectation of $107.76 million.