Company leader
Oakkar Oakkar
Co-founder and CEO
Keona Health
Oakkar Oakkar is co-founder and chief executive of Keona Health, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina company that makes call-center and nurse triage software. A software entrepreneur who came to North Carolina from Hawaii for graduate school, he has led Keona from a student health pilot to CareDesk, which lets a health system's nurses and phone staff handle patient calls from one screen with triage protocols and scheduling built in.
From Hawaii to Chapel Hill
He came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Hawaii as a technology entrepreneur with a background in software development. UNC professor Javed Mostafa persuaded him to choose Carolina over another university by offering him the chance to help start a company while he studied, and he enrolled in the health informatics program at UNC's School of Information and Library Science. He co-founded Keona in 2010 while completing a master's degree in clinical informatics.
The UNC pilot
Keona started with Oakkar as chief technology officer, and Jimmy Kaanapu, his business partner from Honolulu, joined as chief software architect. Its first big test came at UNC's Campus Health Services, which agreed to try the system for a semester starting in January 2012. Students described their symptoms online through an interview built on Schmitt-Thompson triage protocols, the nurse telephone triage guidelines widely used in the United States, and Keona's software wrote a summary note for the health service's nurses, who handled each case five times faster. Oakkar was then named chief executive, and Mostafa stayed on as scientific adviser and chair.
Growing CareDesk
Keona launched at Tulane University Health Services in October 2012, joined the Blueprint Health accelerator, and in June 2013 was named one of Health Datapalooza's top five innovators in health data.
Keona's software grew into CareDesk, which Intermountain Healthcare uses for its centralized team of 40 triage nurses and EmergeOrtho uses to run its orthopedic call center. In 2023 Keona raised a $7 million Series A-1 led by Riverside Acceleration Capital, when it was about nine months from breaking even on cash flow.