# KBMD Consultants

> Physician-led health technology advisory based in Northwest Arkansas. Founded by Katherine Barton, MD, a board-certified emergency physician with clinical, administrative, payer, and legislative experience. KBMD helps founders, health technology buyers, and investors ensure products lower cost, improve efficiency, and are adopted by the patients and clinicians they are built to serve.

## Who KBMD serves
- Founders: validate that the product solves the problem it was built to solve, identify the buyer, identify barriers to commercialization including regulatory and reimbursement hurdles, secure pilot sites and clinical research partners, and prepare for investors.
- Health technology buyers: independent physician assessment of clinical fit, workflow impact, likely adoption, and whether the promised return is realistic.
- Investors: physician-level interpretation of the problem, the product, and the path to adoption and reimbursement.
- Clinicians and professionals: a referral network of physician advisors, fractional executives, and emerging talent matched to companies that need them.

## Founding principles
- Value: health technology must lower cost, raise efficiency, and strengthen the bottom line.
- Adoption: it must reduce, not add to, the burden on patients and clinicians.
- The region: Northwest Arkansas is poised to lead the nation in quality healthcare and health technology.

## About Katherine Barton, MD
- Board-certified emergency physician; member, American College of Emergency Physicians.
- Doctor of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
- Emergency medicine training and early practice in Chicago (1999 to 2008), from community hospitals to Level I trauma centers.
- Medical director leadership for the emergency department and wound care clinics at Northwest Medical Center in Bentonville, and for local plasma centers (2008 to 2023).
- Medical director, Optum at Home (2023 to 2025), later overseeing the program across Kansas and Arkansas: population-level care for the highest-risk patients.
- Helped organize a national physician consortium that presented the root causes of healthcare cost inflation to legislators at the Library of Congress.
- Physician mentor, Fuel Accelerator (since 2023). Adjunct faculty, Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (from fall 2026).

## Pages
- [Home](https://kbmdconsultants.com/): experience and four vantage points, founding principles, why health technology fails and where Dr. Barton helps, clients and partners, contact

## Contact
- Email: dr.barton@kbmdconsultants.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbartonmd/
- Meeting requests are reviewed personally through the contact form on the home page.