Kyna Fong

Kyna Fong is co-founder and chief executive of Elation Health, an electronic health record built for primary care. She was a Stanford economics professor when she and her brother set out to find a record system for their father's paper-filled practice, found none that fit, and built their own.

Entering Harvard at 16

Her family moved from Edmonton, Alberta, to California just before she began high school. She had started school a year early and skipped a grade, so she entered Harvard at 16, choosing it over Stanford because moving to the opposite coast offered the bigger adventure. She studied applied math and computer science, earned a concurrent master's degree, and as a 19-year-old senior won a Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for undergraduate research.

Teaching Economics at Stanford

She earned a PhD in economics at Stanford and in 2008 became an assistant professor of economics there.

Her father's practice pulled her toward software. "We looked at our Dad's practice, which was full of paper," she recalled. "We earnestly were just trying to find some sort of system to put into his practice." Every option they found meant hiring more staff or seeing fewer patients.

Building Elation Health

She and her older brother, Conan Fong, wrote a record for their father's practice, and in 2010 that project became Elation Health. In the first years she wrote much of the software herself. A first financing of $3 million took two years to raise, and a later round, in 2022, brought in $50 million. More than 36,000 clinicians now use the San Francisco, California, company to care for 20 million patients, and in 2025 it earned a Best in KLAS ranking for clinician satisfaction.

Links

• Organization
• LinkedIn

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