The rebranding partnership of R1 and DeSantis Breindel has been shortlisted (confirmed to receive honors) by the Transform Awards North America 2024. The work will receive awards in two categories—Best Corporate Rebrand Following a Merger or Acquisition and Best Visual Identity in the Healthcare, Pharmaceutical and Wellbeing Sector—with winners to be announced at the Transform Awards North America event in New York City on October 3.
Explore R1’s new identity and the brand strategy behind it here.
R1, a leader in revenue cycle management (RCM) for US healthcare, acquired Cloudmed, a leader in AI-powered Revenue Intelligence™ solutions, in early 2022 as part of a series of mergers and acquisitions that drove its market value to approximately $5.9B.
In March 2024, R1 launched a new brand. By aligning their value proposition with their transformed technology platform, shaping a compelling new brand story and go-to-market strategy and by effectively unifying their combined workforce around a shared purpose, leadership positioned the business for growth.
On August 1, R1 announced it will be acquired by TowerBrook Capital Partners and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice for approximately $8.9B.
Following is the story of the R1-DeSantis Breindel partnership: the context, challenges, strategy and execution that led to this award-winning rebrand.
R1: The one RCM partner for peak revenue cycle performance
America’s healthcare systems rely on RCM partners to stay financially viable as businesses, and their market conditions have never been more challenging. They face changing regulations and payer policies, labor shortages, aging tech infrastructure and other pressures that make every dollar count. Their needs are both highly complex and fundamentally human: their priority is delivering exemplary patient care.
R1, a leader in RCM, had been steadily growing both organically and through M&A (notably Cloudmed in 2022) to meet customers where they are in their revenue cycle management journeys. The business could help customers accelerate their revenue and reimbursement while better managing costs—empowering them to deliver care without compromise. But the market, along with R1’s combined workforces, needed to understand all that became possible post-merger for the combination to advance on its new growth path.
A purpose-built technology platform
R1 came to DeSantis Breindel to activate a comprehensive new growth strategy—one anchored by their M&A activity and substantial technology platform expansion. They had built a best-in-class platform powered by AI. They had a fully scalable portfolio of both modular and enterprise-level solutions. They’d embraced a bold new mission, to make healthcare work better for all, and they had a global workforce of nearly 30,000—diverse in every way—in place to achieve it.
Our robust research audience’s understanding of R1 was incomplete. The business’s performance for customers, its pure reach, its aspiration to make healthcare work better for all and its capability to deliver on that promise with increasingly bespoke solutions were all underestimated in the wake of the company’s transformational M&As.
The deepest insight: customers wanted an RCM partner that could relieve their ongoing fiscal challenges and lead them into the future, leaving painful tradeoffs related to patient care behind. Simultaneously, pre- and post-acquisition employees wanted to feel united behind common purpose and opportunity, truly understanding all they could achieve together.
Our strategy was to reimagine R1 as a future-focused RCM partner that helps its customers meet healthcare’s most difficult financial challenges with confidence—never forgetting that the patient experience is the ultimate priority. Everyone at R1 could then feel essential to the mission to make healthcare work better for all, an inspiring basis for any career.
We built upon R1’s new positioning, mission and values to rebrand them as healthcare’s unmistakable RCM partner of choice: the one business with the people, technology and momentum to make reaching pinnacles of care possible.
A brand promising performance—to benefit providers and patients
Launched in March 2024, R1’s rebrand was committed and comprehensive, spanning a new visual identity (corporate and employer brand), robust messaging playbooks, a new website and internal communications to spread understanding—and inspiration—relative to the business’s new offering and customer empowerment.
R1 now stands apart as the RCM partner that helps customers reach “peak revenue cycle performance” to capture the maximized resources that ensure the best care.
The new R1 logo features an iconic symbol: the apex. This shape represents the height of healthcare excellence as viewed on the horizon ahead, conveying that R1 is always looking and moving forward. The apex appears in meaningful variations across R1’s visual identity, establishing a consistent, proprietary motif that reminds the view what R1 represents: the forefront.
A vibrant blue color palette with bright accents signals the company’s innovative, rock-solid technology foundations. New symbols for company values and other iconography communicate key information at a glance. Imagery and messaging communicate R1’s commitment to delivering the solutions each unique customer needs so they can focus on their own mission: delivering high-quality patient care.
We connected employees to their new, shared mission by developing an employer brand for R1. With its own visual identity (a playful extension of the corporate brand), it invites talent to advance their careers and connect meaningfully with each other while making a tangibly positive impact on providers and patients.
Today, R1 is clearly the RCM partner that helps its customers move toward the future with confidence—making healthcare work better for all. R1’s global team members have rallied behind the new brand, united in reaching for the next pinnacle of healthcare excellence together. Customers and investors see one R1 on the rise, the new brand encompassing every area of expertise, innovation and patient focus.
To learn more about how we partner with leaders, founders and investors to drive value creation after game-changing M&A activity, contact us.