Kyna Fong Featured on Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Blog
Kyna Fong Featured on Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Blog August 6, 2013
From Elation Health co-founder Kyna Fong: I’d always been encouraged by my mentors to combine my academic interests in math and economics with my personal interests in healthcare in order to tackle some of the industry’s most pressing problems. My time as an RWJF fellow gave me the rare and exciting opportunity to participate in health policy discussions with policymakers, social scientists, healthcare providers, administrators and other key players in healthcare. This exposure to the inner workings of the system helped me realize the enormous chasm between the dialogue happening at the policy-level and system-level, and the realities of providers on the front line of care, particularly where health IT was concerned. EHRs and other medical technology were being built with little regard to how physicians would use that technology in their day-to-day work to care for patients, and as a result, physicians were forced to use tools built for billing and compliance with administrative requirements instead of for clinical care.
I strongly believed that solving this problem would be essential to transitioning to a healthcare system that had been revolutionized by technology to enable excellent patient care, and my passion for finding a solution led me to build Elation Health with my brother, Conan. Read on to learn more about how thoughtful, well-built healthcare technology can play a crucial role in the future of medicine.
