Payers and Providers Deploy Merlin AI to Drive Smarter Risk Contracting and Maximize
Operational Impact
SAN FRANCISCO — March 5, 2026 — Arbital Health, the leader in Actuarial AI-enabled infrastructure for healthcare, today announced the demonstrable success and rapid market adoption of Merlin AI, its Actuarial AI Assistant for value-based care (VBC) and risk contracting. Arbital combines deep actuarial experience with a robust AI-powered platform to continuously measure contract performance, forecast financial impact, and deliver actionable insights in time to optimize results.
Since launching in October 2025, Merlin AI has been embraced by leading enterprise payers, providers, and value-based care enablers, including: Arkos Health, CommuniCare Health Centers, and Complete Health, among many others. These early adopters are actively using the Arbital Actuarial AI platform to accelerate decision-making and unlock the clinical need with the greatest impact on spend and medical loss ratios (MLR).
Eric Tanner, CEO of Arkos Health, shared, "Arbital Health’s Merlin AI strengthens our ability to interpret and respond to risk and utilization patterns in value-based care. It has quickly become an important tool for our team, enabling us to engage directly with actuarial data and generate meaningful insights in real time. The ability to quickly understand performance trends and cost drivers allows us to act earlier, coordinate care more effectively, and improve outcomes for the members we serve."
When asked why Merlin AI has been adopted so quickly by the industry, Brian Overstreet, President and CEO of Arbital Health, said that “Cost pressure is increasing. In recent years utilization patterns changed, the risk mix moved and pricing assumptions broke down. Trends are shifting faster than these company’s internal models, systems and teams can even reconcile. They need reliable actuarial-grade insights designed to identify avoidable areas of spend before they occur.”
In only five months, Merlin AI has helped leading payers and providers confidently and proactively manage contract performance, identify cost-drivers, and operationalize next best actions at scale across hundreds of contract settlements and millions of covered lives.
“Merlin is transforming how VBC contracts are managed. It brings our clients what they need from AI — unified and enriched data sources, actuarial-grade rules and logic, enterprise level security and privacy, and dynamic workplaces, all in one transparent, audit-ready platform that documents its work,” said Brian Overstreet, President & CEO of Arbital Health.
Merlin’s adoption underscores a fundamental shift in how enterprise healthcare organizations think about risk contracting. Merlin AI isn’t simply a reporting tool; it’s an operational partner that drives alignment and accelerates decision-making in an increasingly complex value-based care environment.
Clients are replacing fragmented analytics processes with a single conversational interface that directly answers questions such as:
- “Which contracts are trending toward deficit this quarter?”
- “Show me a list of patients who are at risk of avoidable admissions”
- “What utilization drivers are most influencing performance across my portfolio of contracts?"
- “What is my current PMPM and MLR by market and year?”
- “Show me total cost of care, risk scores and MLR by provider.”
Merlin AI has over 80 actuarially developed starter-prompts to ensure users are getting answers that are accurate and actionable. And, with over 100 pre-defined, best-in-class workflows and workspaces, Merlin makes it simple for any team to create, define and rank next-best actions in managing risk and controlling cost.
“Arbital Health is uniquely positioned at the intersection of deep actuarial expertise and advanced AI-driven technology”, said Robert Stewart, Chief Technology Officer of Arbital Health. “Merlin AI leverages actuarial-grade logic that ensures every answer traces back to validated models and calculations that can be documented and audited. The underlying unified data foundation eliminates the bottlenecks of fragmented data sources, enabling rapid, trusted answers for our clients.”
Merlin AI is available now as part of the Arbital Health platform.
About Arbital Health:
Arbital Health provides the Actuarial AI-enabled infrastructure for providers and payers to successfully manage risk-based contracts. Combining the industry’s leading value-based care actuaries with a robust AI-powered platform, Arbital Health centralizes fragmented data, accelerates contract performance monitoring, and helps speed decision making. Merlin AI, the company’s embedded actuarial AI assistant, is powered by actuarial logic to continuously measure contract performance, forecast financial impact, and deliver actionable insights to drive down spend and MLR and improve patient outcomes while there is still time to act. Arbital Health is led by a best-in-class team of healthcare actuaries, engineers, and industry veterans, and backed by leading investors: Valtruis, Transformation Capital, Shaper Capital and Healthy Ventures. For more information, visit ArbitalHealth.com.
Press Contact:
Rachel DiMartino
marketing@arbitalhealth.com
