Your patients reach you faster, your staff carry less, and your contact center runs calmer, because CareDesk, our AI-powered patient access CRM, is built specifically for healthcare providers to simplify workflows and reduce staff workload.
We started Keona over 15 years ago with one mission: make every patient interaction simpler, faster, and safer, for patients, nurses, and the contact centers that serve them. Since then, we have helped thousands of health providers across the country optimize the way they handle patient access.
We saw patient access fragmenting into a daily struggle. To us, the patient experience doesn’t begin in the exam room. It begins at the very first point of contact: access. So we built a way to reduce that friction, integrating AI into your existing systems and giving patients self-scheduling that puts them in control, while your staff workload drops at the same time.
How we build is as deliberate as why we build. A few beliefs shape every decision we make
In healthcare, you always need people. So we built AI to work alongside your staff, not around them. When a patient moves from chat to a phone call, the full context moves with them, and your team never starts the conversation over.
The AI safety in our name is a choice, not a slogan. Keona runs on consistent, rule-based logic you can predict and trust, not a black box that improvises around clinical decisions. Your patients get the same right answer every time.
Phone, web, and text scheduling all run on the same access intelligence, so your patients get a consistent, omni-channel experience however they choose to reach you.
Plenty of tools handle the simple requests and hand everything harder back to your staff. We built Keona for the genuinely complicated work: the care flows, provider preferences, and scheduling rules that real practices run on every day.
Provider and patient satisfaction sit at the core of everything we build, which is why we hold ourselves to these values:
Co-Founder & CEO
Oakkar co-founded Keona Health in 2010 while completing his Master’s in Clinical Informatics at UNC Chapel Hill, where he developed the concept for Keona out of a simple desire to improve how patients and providers communicate. A software developer by background, he brings over a decade of experience building healthcare technology that combines clinical workflow, data science, and AI. He leads Keona’s strategic direction, product vision, and healthcare workflow innovation.
Co-Founder & COO
Stephen began his career in information technology, working as a developer for Hewlett-Packard and several startups before earning his MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. He co-founded Keona Health, where he has spent 15 years building AI systems that transform patient access. He oversees finance, marketing, and operations.
Co-Founder & CTO
Jimmy co-founded Keona Health in 2010 and has played a key role in developing the platform’s call support software and clinical workflow tooling. Before Keona, he served as Chief Software Architect at Prudential Locations in Hawaii, where he led software and database development and earned multiple Innovator of the Year awards. He holds a BBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Director of Services & Analytics
Timothy Ogrentz is a registered nurse who has been in the field since 1995 and joined Keona Health in 2018. As Director of Services & Analytics, he leads clinical informatics, analytics, and AI initiatives behind Keona’s next-generation triage platform, including AI-assisted triage, LLM-powered nurse tools, and automated clinical guideline generation. Tim combines his clinical expertise with data and AI to help contact centers make smarter, faster decisions while improving nurse workflows, customer experiences, and patient outcomes.
Director of Marketing
Ryan Hunt is a healthcare technology and digital development professional at Keona Health, where he contributes to content and digital initiatives focused on improving patient experiences and healthcare operations. His work covers healthcare CRM, patient communication, scheduling, telehealth, and emerging technologies such as AI. Through his work at Keona Health, Ryan helps share insights and practical strategies that support healthcare organizations in creating more efficient, connected, and patient-centered experiences.
Your patients’ data deserves more than a promise. Keona is HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 Type II Certified, and our security controls aren’t self-graded. Vanta, an independent third party, continuously monitors them across infrastructure, product, organizational, and internal security.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, we run penetration testing every year, and CareDesk is hosted on Microsoft Azure. You can see our controls for yourself in our Trust Center, or reach our security team at security@keonahealth.com.
These are some of the organizations who count on us to redefine patient-provider communication:
At Keona, the impact is tangible. Every workflow we improve means a patient gets through faster, a nurse carries less stress, and a health system runs better. Want to join us? See our open roles on
