Women in Health Innovation Spotlight: Kyna Fong
Kyna Fong is the CEO and co-founder of Elation Health, the largest and most-trusted clinical technology platform for primary care in the U.S.. A Harvard and Stanford-trained health economist with years of experience working in her father's primary care practice, Kyna built Elation to help clinicians deliver high-value personalized care. Recognized by Inc. Magazine, Goldman Sachs, Rock Health, and Fierce Healthcare, Kyna is a leading voice in primary care innovation and advocacy.
Her writing has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company, and she has presented at major conferences including ViVE, HLTH, and the Primary Care for America Summit. Today, Elation’s AI-powered EHR and billing solutions support 40,000 clinical users, caring for over 21 million patients.
1. Coming from a family with medical backgrounds, what inspired you to transition from a career in economics and academia to becoming a health tech entrepreneur? Was there something specific that shifted your primary focus?
We often call ourselves accidental entrepreneurs, as it wasn’t our plan to start a health technology company. My brother Conan was working as a consultant and I was an economics professor at Stanford when the big national push in the US for electronic health record systems to replace paper charts began. We saw the systems that were available to our dad’s primary care medical practice, and they were so poorly designed, so disconnected from patient care and the actual craft of medicine, that we felt we had to do something. Elation Health began as an alternative to offer a handful of doctors we knew, and it grew from there.
2. You’ve said that you co-founded Elation Health to support primary care medical practices like your father’s. Can you tell us more about how that connection shaped your vision for the company? How does this goal continue to influence your leadership today?
We have always followed a “clinical-first” design philosophy at Elation - meaning putting patient care first and foremost - and I wish it wasn’t still something today that makes us unique in the market. Most health technology systems are designed primarily for billing, and the experience of the clinicians and patients using it is at best an afterthought. It’s an unfortunate way to bring technology into the physician-patient relationship and has contributed significantly to the current epidemics of burnout and distrust in healthcare. Primary care deserves so much better. We try our best to earn the trust of clinicians every day.
3. You recently participated in a White House event to advance patient care in the health tech ecosystem. Can you share what it was? Given your experience in both health economics and healthcare innovation, how would you explain the complexities of the American healthcare system to those who aren’t familiar with it?
We were invited to the White House in August for a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) event focused on a voluntary shared commitment, both public and private, to advancing interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem. Elation was there representing the primary care community, as one of 60 organizations pledging to enable more secure and seamless access to health records for patients and clinicians. It was promising to see the government engage those most eagerly asking for health data - patients, primary care, rural/safety net hospitals - at the same table as those who hold the data.
To your second question, American healthcare today is very much “sick care” - it’s largely a system that doesn’t pay for keeping patients healthy but rather incentivizes maximizing the volume of patients receiving expensive treatments in expensive facilities (i.e. when they are sick). The environment has been changing, though, with the gradual shifts toward value-based payments. Primary care is where we can see the biggest potential impact on the "quadruple aim” of improving patient experience, improving population health, reducing the cost of healthcare, and improving clinician experience. For every $1 invested into primary care, we get $13 of value in reduced downstream spend. If every patient in the US had a primary care clinician they could trust, we’d be living in a very different healthcare landscape.
4. As AI and other technologies rapidly reshape healthcare, what innovations do you believe will have the biggest impact on primary care over the next decade? Is there a specific pressing challenge you see AI or future innovation addressing and relieving?
We’re at an exciting crossroads for AI and primary care. I truly believe several forces are aligning to elevate primary care into the leadership role we all should want it to have in healthcare. Health data sharing is accelerating, giving physicians better visibility across care settings. At the same time, AI is making it possible to turn that data into meaningful insights, without overwhelming clinicians. Primary care plays a critical “quarterback” role: bringing data together and working with patients to chart the best path forward. With AI, clinicians can focus more on practicing medicine the way they were trained to.
A major challenge today is the ever-growing shortage of primary care physicians. AI won’t replace doctors, but it will help extend their reach. From reducing administrative burden to surfacing clinical insights and supporting patient engagement, AI makes it possible for clinicians to work more efficiently and meaningfully. Ultimately, this ensures more patients have access to high-quality, relationship-centered primary care.
5. Can you tell us more about Elation’s Electronic Health Record, EHR, system? What makes it so unique?
Elation Health is the largest platform for primary care in the US, with 40,000 clinical users today caring for 21 million patients. We take our responsibility to this community seriously, both with our clinical-first approach to the technology (which has been recognized as providing the best physician experience) and with our role as an advocate for primary care, through working with organizations including Primary Care for America, American Academy of Family Physicians, and CMS. We’re always aiming to raise the bar, and there’s always more that we can be doing to deliver on the promise in our company name — “elation” — to restore the joy of practicing medicine with primary care clinicians.
