How CloseKnit Health Standardized Patient Communication Across 45 Clinics and Saved 2,200 Hours with TextExpander

CloseKnit Health was founded in 2021 as a virtual-first healthcare clinic, built to make primary care accessible from anywhere. What began as a telehealth practice grew into an in-person advanced primary care organization with over 40 physical locations across DC, Maryland, and Virginia, plus virtual care available in all 50 states. Their care model spans primary care, behavioral health, nutrition, urgent sick visits, and an advocacy arm that helps employers navigate benefits for their workforce.

With that level of growth comes a robust tech stack and a lot of operational complexity, which is how TextExpander became part of CloseKnit’s workflow in 2024.

The challenge: Multiple voices across multiple systems

CloseKnit’s infrastructure is intentionally interconnected. Their proprietary patient portal (where patients go for every step in the care process) integrates with their EHR (Athena) and a network of third-party partner systems. Behind the scenes, that means staff are working across multiple platforms and systems every day.

The problem: Every system has its own native tools, templates, and macros, and none of them talk to each other.

Jacob Moore, Product Manager at CloseKnit, explains: “We have all of these different systems, and we wanted to have a unified voice when we talk to patients. Athena has macros, but we can’t use those in other systems. That’s kind of where we started looking at things like TextExpander.”systems to serve patients:

On the patient-facing side, the stakes were just as high. Without a shared communication standard, individual staff members were writing their own patient messages with no guarantee of consistent tone, accuracy, or professionalism. They knew they needed a way to ensure every message felt like it came from the same organization.
And for providers, time spent typing was time spent away from care.

Building a shared library that teams can use anywhere

CloseKnit discovered TextExpander through their EHR marketplace and chose it for its ease of setup, cost, and accessibility. Moore handled admin configuration, while practice managers built the initial Snippet library. Every new Snippet request comes through them before it goes live.

Kammikia Barnes, Population Health Strategist at CloseKnit, found the shared library helped everything from onboarding new employees to building consistency across teams.

“Before we started using TextExpander, we were all answering, to the best of our ability, based on the questions that patients would ask,” she explained. 

“It was all very straightforward after we got TextExpander because the answers were right in front of us. We didn’t have to go look for them. It took away the second-guessing.”

5 ways CloseKnit uses TextExpander

TextExpander runs across five main teams at CloseKnit: Care Support Team, Clinicians, Health Guides, Nurse Navigators, and Tech Support. Key use cases include:

Barnes explained how TextExpander cut down prep time work with providers in her earlier role as a clinician. 

• Patient communication: Health Guides and front desk staff use Snippets for follow-up reminders, lab result notifications, portal navigation instructions, and directing patients to partner services like behavioral health or nutrition.
• Clinical documentation: Clinicians use Snippets for aftercare summaries and chart notes: Everything from biometrics and smoking cessation notes to GLP-1 side effects. One nurse practitioner built an extensive library that she uses across both patient-facing messages and internal charting.

“The provider I was under had certain templates based on the patient she was seeing,” she explained.

“I was able to put those templates into TextExpander, so she didn’t have to retype the templates for each visit. The TextExpander Snippet had everything she wanted to see. What used to take about an hour and a half to two hours, TextExpander took down to 45 minutes.”

• Medical assistant charting: Two Medical Assistants support 15 providers simultaneously, each managing inboxes with up to 300 active patient cases per day.
• Consistency across in-person and virtual providers: Telehealth and in-person teams use the same Snippet library, so patients receive the same answers regardless of care setting.
• Advocacy arm of the business: CloseKnit offers employers a care navigation service. The team built a TextExpander form to document next steps and standardize copy for each patient’s unique navigation case.

The Results

Between March 2025 and March 2026, CloseKnit has expanded 91,195 Snippets, saving an estimated 2,208 hours on documentation and communication across the team. That’s time given back to patient care.

The qualitative impact is just as tangible. Communication errors are down, and the team speaks with one voice across every channel, every system, every patient interaction.