For Connie Chen, transforming mental health care starts with marrying medical expertise and technology at scale. As Chief Operating Officer at Lyra Health, she leads the company’s efforts to expand access to high-quality mental health services, including the development of its Blended Care Therapy programs. Having built and scaled tech-enabled health services before, she approaches her work with the belief that care delivery can be both deeply personal and operationally efficient. “Take risks, trust your gut, put your nickel down on a starting point, and be ready to own the output,” she advises, underscoring her hands-on approach to solving problems that have no clear blueprint.
Born into a family of physicians, with over 20 relatives in medicine, Chen grew up immersed in health care conversations. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics and health policy from Harvard University, before completing her medical degree in health and society at the University of California, San Francisco. While in medical school, she became captivated by the “maker culture” and the potential to “hack health care” through software-driven solutions, leading her to co-found Vida, a health coaching app now serving Fortune 500 employers and major insurers. After raising significant venture funding and scaling Vida’s impact, she transitioned from her full-time role there to return to residency at Stanford, drawn by its culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Today at Lyra, she brings both her clinical background and entrepreneurial experience to the mission of redefining mental health access.
Chen’s resilience and perspective have been shaped by the women in her family, particularly her grandmothers. Her maternal grandmother broke barriers as Taiwan’s first female anesthesiologist, while her paternal grandmother fled Communist China with nothing and built a thriving national stationery business from discarded goods. Remembering their perseverance during her own entrepreneurial challenges helped her push forward without venture capital safety nets. At Lyra, that spirit translates into creating scalable mental health solutions that meet people where they are while never losing sight of the human stories behind the care.