Elation Health Files for IPO: Powering Primary Care with a Clinician-First EHR Platform Serving 24,000 Physicians and 12.8 Million Patients

Elation Health is a healthcare services company founded in 2010 in San Francisco, California, USA. It has developed a cloud-based care platform for clinicians, enabling them to deliver healthcare services more efficiently, reduce administrative burdens, and strengthen patient-provider relationships. The platform also facilitates secure information sharing among healthcare providers across different organizations.

On July 26, 2022, Elation Health announced the completion of a $50 million Series D financing round, co-led by Generation Investment Management and Ascension Ventures, with participation from Threshold Ventures, Ascend Partners, and individual investors including Fay Rotenberg and Jonathan Bush. To date, Elation Health has completed six rounds of financing, raising a total of $108 million.

In this round of financing, in addition to several investment firms, two individual investors are also noteworthy. Fay Rotenberg is the CEO of Firefly Health, a startup healthcare services company. In addition to his role at Firefly Health, Jonathan Bush serves as the CEO of Zus Health, another healthcare services company. He previously co-founded Athenahealth, a major healthcare services company that ranked first in the 2022 KLAS (a globally authoritative healthcare research organization) rankings.

So, what exactly is it about Elation Health that has attracted the favor of several investment firms and even its technologically leading competitors? Let’s continue to find out.

Kyna Fong, Co-founder and CEO (left), Conan Fong, Co-founder and CXO (right)

Elation Health was co-founded by siblings Conan Fong and Kyna Fong, who serve as Chief Experience Officer (CXO) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), respectively. Coming from a medical family, they grew up working and spending time in their father’s primary care clinic. Kyna assisted her father with tasks ranging from answering patient calls to negotiating with insurance companies as the office manager, gaining firsthand insight into the substantial time and effort primary care physicians devote to maintaining their patients’ health.

In the digital age, traditional paper records have been replaced by electronic systems, requiring both clinicians and patients to promptly adapt to changes in the clinical encounter process. Most electronic systems are designed with the goals of reducing clinicians’ administrative burden and enabling precise billing. However, due to differences between primary care settings and large healthcare systems, such designs fail to alleviate the administrative burden on primary care physicians. Instead, they deviate from the core objectives of direct and accessible care in primary health care, complicating the clinical encounter process and exacerbating physician burnout.

It was precisely this hands-on experience that led Kyna Fong to realize that primary care physicians face greater pressure than their peers in other specialties, and that technology had become completely misaligned with the goal of delivering high-quality patient care. Thus, the idea gradually took shape to help primary care physicians work more efficiently and enable patients to receive higher-quality care.

Kyna Fong describes herself as an “accidental entrepreneur.” In her view, “entrepreneurs usually decide what they want to do early in their careers, but I was the complete opposite. My brother and I simply identified a problem and wanted to solve it; everything else fell into place naturally.” This open-minded, problem-solving approach has also made the course of her life feel logical and inevitable.

At the age of 19, Kyna earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard University. In the same year, she began pursuing a Ph.D. in economics with a focus on healthcare at Stanford University. She subsequently served as an assistant professor at Stanford University for four years, while concurrently holding a fellowship at the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

For Kyna, every next moment in life holds infinite possibilities. “Take pursuing a doctoral degree, for instance. If you had asked me during my senior year of undergraduate studies whether I planned to pursue a PhD, I would have answered, ‘No, why would I?’” It is this mindset of embracing life’s boundless potential that leads Kyna to focus solely on problem-solving whenever she identifies an issue. “I truly wanted to solve this problem, and doing so required founding a company.” Kyna believes that people often portray academia and entrepreneurship as opposing extremes. Although they operate at different paces, “what draws me to both academia and entrepreneurship is similar: standing at the edge of the known and striving to create something new.”

Another co-founder, Conan Fong, earned a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology from McGill University, followed by a master’s degree in Health Finance and Management from Johns Hopkins University. Since graduation, he has worked in medical IT sales, primarily facilitating the digitization of health records within large healthcare systems and collaborating with primary care physicians to help them better leverage IT technologies. These professional experiences led Conan to recognize that while information technology can improve the current state of healthcare delivery, there is a need for more user-friendly IT tools.

Compared with partners at other startups, Kyna believes the greatest advantage of collaborating with her brother is trust. “I know what my co-founder intends, and even if we process different information or view problems from different perspectives, I ultimately know I can trust him.” Trust is the foundation for getting things done.

The EHR (Electronic Health Record) sector is not an untapped blue ocean. To stand out among numerous EHR platform providers, Elation Health must demonstrate its unique value proposition. “Traditional EHRs are designed around billing requirements, with workflows that ensure physicians can bill effectively. While this is important, it still places significant strain on the clinical side,” said Kyna. Building on this insight, Elation Health has optimized its system around the patient view and reengineered workflows to deliver more suitable care services.

Now, Elation Health as an API(Application Programming Interface)Powered by an EHR platform, it eliminates the need to build technical systems from scratch, enabling accelerated innovation in care delivery models. The platform currently supports over one million API calls per day and connects with more than 300 technology and healthcare organization partners, including healthcare service companies such as Dock Health, Hint Health, and Zus Health. Latest data shows that 24,000 clinicians use its technology to provide healthcare services to 12.8 million patients.

Elation Health’s system accounts for multi-user platform usage and interactions, allowing clients to customize personalized workflow solutions. Prior to visits, patients can schedule appointments online, complete check-in procedures, and fill out forms that populate their charts, while also receiving appointment reminders. By automating key steps, the system facilitates patient examinations and ensures thorough communication.

Patient Interface Source: Elation Health Official Website

For patients unable to attend in-person consultations, the platform also facilitates virtual nursing care. Within the nursing environment, video consultations and charting are conducted through a workbench, establishing communication links between patients and clinics.

Virtual Care Source: Elation Health Official Website

During consultations, the platform simplifies charting and administrative tasks by offering functionalities such as e-prescribing, clinical documentation creation, and order entry. It optimizes clinical decision-making through templated notes, automated coding, and clinical alerts, thereby generating clear and user-friendly interconnected patient charts.

Patient Record Management Source: Elation Health

After the consultation, the platform automatically shares care plans and treatment regimens with patients, establishes communication channels with them, and enables performance monitoring through clinical quality dashboards. Meanwhile, it stratifies and categorizes patients by risk level, utilizing batch outreach features to deliver reminders, customized communications, and other materials, thereby facilitating cross-functional communication.

Patient Communication Source: Elation Health

After a period of use, the platform can streamline practice inbox management tasks, generate payment records, business reports, and performance analytics charts, thereby reducing the administrative burden on physicians’ clinical work.

Work Record Source: Elation Health

Meanwhile, Elation Health also facilitates collaborative health record management, serves as an API for connecting third-party applications, and provides a hosted database for advanced analytics. By integrating with hospitals, laboratories, and all other necessary data sources, it delivers reliable patient information to enhance patient care and reduce manual workload.

Multi-Platform Data Integration Source: Elation Health

It is estimated that 90% of the $4 trillion spent on healthcare in the United States is influenced by primary care, with every $1 invested in primary care yielding $13 in savings. The profound impact of primary care on health services, coupled with its substantial return on investment, positions it as a critical area with significant growth potential and serves as the cornerstone of community health.

Elation Health was founded with a focus on primary care, aiming to help independent primary care practices achieve the following three goals.

1) Reduce care costs. Leveraging the platform’s innovative expertise in primary care can streamline clinical workflows and drive efficient, value-based growth, while providing tailored solutions for patients, employers, and physicians to effectively lower care costs.

2) Develop appropriate technical solutions. Utilize its patient experience tools or build using its API.Implement a tailored technical solution to achieve comprehensive and personalized care.

3) Optimize user experience. Simplify workstation operations to reduce physician burnout when using the technology, enabling them to focus on patient care. In the 2020 KLAS Best in KLAS report, Elation Health achieved a score of 89.8, which is undoubtedly significant encouragement for a startup company.

As founder Kyna Fong stated, their technology “holds immense power in a future led by primary care. Over the past few decades, the specialist-driven, billing-first concept of care and the technology enabling it have resulted in unsustainable costs—burnout and declining health outcomes. Our healthcare system is undergoing a significant shift toward primary care.”