Who We Are
Built by someone who
lived the problem.
The Founding Story
A system that was
failing the people
who needed it most.
Across a decade spent inside some of healthcare's most demanding environments — from fast-moving urgent care centers to the hallways of academic medical institutions, from the precision of interventional pain management to the frontier of digital health — Phillip Ndowu saw the same story repeat itself, over and over again.
Brilliant physicians. Committed staff. Practices that genuinely wanted to do right by their patients. And yet, buried under mountains of billing denials, HR paperwork, compliance audits, credentialing renewals, and financial reports that no one had time to read — the clinical mission was suffocating.
The problem was never the medicine. It was everything around the medicine.
"Physicians didn't train for a decade to spend their evenings on hold with insurance companies. They trained to heal people. My job is to give that time back."
— Phillip Ndowu, MPH · Founder, Kerano Health Partners
Kerano Health Partners was built as the answer to that broken reality. Not another vendor. Not another software platform. A true operational partner — one that embeds into the fabric of your practice and handles every administrative function with the same precision and care your clinical team brings to patient care.
In 2024, Phillip went one step further — he acquired his own interventional pain management practice. Not because he needed to. Because to truly serve practice owners, he had to stand in their shoes. That decision transformed Kerano from a consulting firm into something rarer: an MSO led by someone who has operated from both sides of the table.
Our Mission
Phillip Ndowu is not a consultant who studied healthcare from the outside. He is a healthcare operations executive who has lived it — building, scaling, and transforming practices across urgent care, academic medicine, digital health, and interventional pain management over the span of a decade.
His academic foundation — a B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Communication from California Baptist University, followed by a Master of Public Health in Healthcare Management from Emory University — gave him a rare dual lens: the clinical rigor to understand how care is delivered, and the systems thinking to understand how it is managed.
In 2024, he made a decision few consultants ever make: he acquired his own interventional pain management practice, stepping fully into the role of practice owner. The insight that followed is what makes Kerano's approach categorically different from any other MSO in the market.
What few know about Phillip is that the same discipline driving his operational rigor has always had a creative counterpart. A classically trained musician (clarinet, flute, and upright bass), an award-winning photojournalist, and a student of craft in everything he touches — Phillip brings to Kerano what he brings to everything: an unrelenting eye for what could be better, and the patience to build it right.