A note from our co-founders, Anne and Craig Knoche

To our education partners, colleagues, and friends,

We are delighted to announce that i-Human Patients is now part of Kaplan. For quite a long time Kaplan has been impressed by our team’s passionate commitment to our mission to serve healthcare educators, students and practitioners with the very best possible education products for building and assessing cognitive competencies. Kaplan’s shared commitment to our mission, their complementary education offerings and worldwide reach will strengthen our ability to continue to listen intently, innovate and serve all of you in a first-class way.

Strengthening our Mission

As most of you know, the origin of i-Human Patients came from our (Anne & Craig’s) personal experience as students of patient assessment and management. Many years ago, we had enrolled in a course on wilderness emergency medicine in preparation for mountaineering expeditions to remote areas of the world. We were pleased to find ourselves “A” students in all of the classroom activities as measured by our scores on MCQ tests of our knowledge of anatomy, physiology, assessment processes and management protocols. However, when it came time to integrate and apply all that knowledge in simulated scenarios, we found ourselves completely incompetent. We learned first-hand there is a wide gulf between knowledge and competency and that the path to getting there requires lots of practice to integrate and apply knowledge. Practice must address both depth and breadth.

Our “day jobs” at the time were in Silicon Valley where we were immersed in all the excitement and innovation of the early days of the world-wide-web. We recognized the trajectory towards a day when bandwidth would be essentially unlimited and media and interaction would become what we all have become accustomed to today. We were excited about the future possibilities for education and simulation to help with the learning gap we had personally experienced.

Then came our wake-up call. A diagnosis of cancer, as so often does, focused us on what is important in life. We turned our attention away from companies building electronic shopping carts, social networks, et al, towards building something that would have greater meaning and contribution to humanity. We dedicated ourselves to creating simulations that can help people build and measure competency in the crucial cognitive skills necessary to be a great healthcare provider. We aimed to create products that would give one truly useful, actionable feedback on ways to improve, and to give one the opportunity for unlimited practice – breadth and depth. We built i-Human Patients online service.

Along the way we have been very fortunate to have found many educators and organizations that have shared our vision and passion. They have been collaborators, colleagues, advisors, contributors, supporters and have become life-long friends. We would like to extend special thanks to our early educator collaborators at the University of Chicago, Rush Medical College and Rosalind Franklin University of Health Science, to our many case authors and institutional partners, to our supporters at the AMA, the National Science Foundation and the Reliance Foundation, to our subscribing educators and students who give us helpful constructive feedback that helps us improve and better serve your needs, and to our personal friends who invested in our company so that we were able to build our team with great software engineers and a first-class consultative sales, implementation, and support staff. They too have become life-long friends. We are deeply thankful to all of you, and lastly, and especially to Norm Wu, our CEO who has worked tirelessly for the cause.

We look forward to a great future as part of Kaplan. Our commitment to our origins and mission has been strengthened today.

Sincerely,

Anne & Craig Knoche

Co-founders