The back story to Keona Health’s $2.5 million funding round is about an entrepreneur’s journey from Burma to Chapel Hill to revolutionizing – perhaps – triage with technology. Laura Baverman, editor of WRAL TechWire news partner ExitEvent, has the details.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Keona Health is rolling in two months since it landed $2.5 million from a strategic investor and began testing its triage software platform in hospitals and doctors’ offices in the Triangle and beyond.
But sit down with founder Oakkar Oakkar, and you’ll learn a fascinating back story of more than five years of planning, persistence, passion and scrappiness that it took to win over investors and get on today’s path toward revolutionizing the way the medical industry handles inbound calls from sick patients.
Here’s my attempt to tell it:
Oakkar grew up in Burma (a nation just west of Thailand) into a political family, and was sent to college in Hawaii to avoid conflict happening in the country.
It was while surfing that he met a mentor who would inspire his career. A consultant for hospitals at Stanford University and Harvard shared with him the challenges of building and launching information systems that make hospitals more efficient. A software developer by trade and co-founder of a business building applications for people in the healthcare and real estate tourism businesses, Oakkar became interested in the field of health informatics.
An eye-opening experience seeking health advice in Hawaii helped him determine a specific path for that interest. When his nose started bleeding uncontrollably—something he’d never experienced before—he called every hospital in town and never reached a person. Then he sat in an ER for six hours before a nurse determined he just wasn’t used to the dryness in Hawaii. He paid $650.
The full post can be read online at ExitEvent.
