Hao Tong, MD, is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Tong’s research centers on language equity in health care, with a particular focus on patients with limited English proficiency. Her work explores how language-concordant patient–clinician pairings form in outpatient care, what motivates patients and clinicians to seek these relationships, and how such concordance influences patient outcomes, physician professional identity, and well-being. She is also interested in developing health system interventions to support multilingual clinicians and improve equitable care delivery.
By combining her clinical expertise with rigorous epidemiologic methods, she aims to advance patient-centered approaches that bridge language barriers and reduce disparities in health care. She completed her undergraduate studies, medical school, and internal medicine residency at the University of Washington, where she also served as Chief Resident before beginning fellowship training. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at Penn, equipping her with advanced quantitative and qualitative research methods to apply to questions of health equity and health systems improvement.
Outside of medicine, she enjoys traveling, exploring different cultural cuisines, and spending time outdoors with her husband and their 85-pound Goldendoodle, Kubo.