Alice Hm Chen Email Address

Chief Medical Officer

The Communicable Disease Control and Prevention Section, part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health,works closely with community members, clinicians, and city, state, and private organizations to protect the health of San Franciscans and our visitors. To control and prevent the spread of disease we support community immunization programs, clinician education and training, and emergency preparedness. We monitor communicable disease outbreaks, alert clinicians to public health threats, investigate cases, and address routes of infection.

Dr. Alice Hm Chen is chief medical officer at Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace, which actively works to ensure that Californians can find affordable, high quality coverage. In this role she is responsible for health care strategy focused on quality, equity, and delivery system transformation with the goal of improving access and outcomes for all Californians. Prior to joining Covered California, Dr. Chen served as deputy secretary for policy and planning and chief of clinical affairs for the California Health and Human Services Agency. She led many of the Agency’s signature health policy initiatives on affordability and access, and played a leadership role in the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the areas of strategic reopening, hospital surge planning, data analytics and therapeutics. Previously Dr. Chen spent 15 years on the faculty of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine based at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where she served as its chief integration officer and founding director of the eConsult program. She subsequently served as inaugural chief medical officer and deputy director for the San Francisco Health Network, where she was responsible for providing clinical and operational leadership, vision, and direction for the City’s $2 billion a year publicly funded delivery system encompassing primary, specialty, mental health, substance use, acute care, trauma, long term, jail health, and homeless health care services. Dr. Chen has published over 50 book chapters, research and peer-reviewed articles, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Health Affairs. She has served on the board of several non-profits and foundations, and currently serves as board president of The Health Initiative. In 2019, she was elected to the Harvard University Board of Overseers. A graduate of Yale University, Stanford University Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Chen's training includes a primary care internal medicine residency and chief residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is an alumna of the Commonwealth Fund Harvard University Fellowship in Minority Health Policy, the California Health Care Foundation Leadership Program, and the Aspen Institute’s Health Innovators Fellowship. Proficient in Mandarin and Spanish, she maintains an active primary care practice at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and holds an appointment as clinical professor of medicine at UCSF.