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Alice Huan-mei Chen, M.D., M.P.H., is the Chief Integration Officer, Director of the Center for Innovation in Access and Quality, and Director of the eReferral Program at San Francisco General Hospital, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Chen’s primary interest is in issues of health care access, particularly in how poverty, race/ethnicity, and policy intersect with healthcare delivery systems to produce barriers to care. Her work focuses on creating policies and programs to improve access to and quality of care for underserved communities.

Prior to joining UCSF, she practiced primary care internal medicine at Asian Health Services, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Oakland. She also served as Health Policy Scholar in Residence at The California Endowment, where she oversaw the healthcare foundation’s language access grantmaking program. She was subsequently awarded a Soros Physician Advocacy Fellowship to partner with the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, where she worked with a wide range of stakeholders – including community-based organizations, policymakers, and organized medicine – to promote the financing and provision of language assistance services in California.

She has served on state and national expert advisory committees on language access, cultural competency, and health disparities, including for the American Medical Association, the California Academy of Family Physicians, the California Association of Public Hospitals, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is frequently asked to present on access to care for the underserved, healthcare delivery finance and reform, and language barriers in healthcare, and has been an invited speaker at forums for the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the Commonwealth Club of California, Grantmakers in Health, Health Affairs, and the USC Annenberg School of Communication.

At San Francisco General Hospital, Dr. Chen cares for a panel of primary care patients, precepts internal medicine residents during their continuity clinic, attends on the inpatient medical service, and staffs the medical consultation service. As Chief Integration Officer she has the dual charge of providing physician oversight for SFGH’s ambulatory services as well as providing institutional leadership for creating an integrated delivery system for the Department of Public Health, with a focus on improving care between primary and specialty care, ambulatory and inpatient care, and between SFGH and other organizations in the San Francisco safety net. She is Director of the hospital’s eReferral Program, a web-based referral and consultation system that allows iterative exchanges between referring providers and specialty reviewers and has garnered significant attention from healthcare systems across the country interested in replicating the eReferral model. She serves on multiple hospital, San Francisco Health Plan, and Department of Public Health committees pertaining to primary care, access, quality improvement, and the use of health information technology in the safety net.

She is core faculty for the San Francisco General Primary Care Residency Program, and has been instrumental in developing the Partnership for Physician Advocacy Skills (PPAS) curriculum, which provides policy and advocacy knowledge and skills development for residents who are focused on the care of the underserved. The curriculum covers topics such as legislative and administrative advocacy, GIS mapping, Health Impact Assessments, media advocacy, and Writing for Change, whose goal is to cultivate narrative writing with a policy perspective. Writing for Change received the UCSF 2011 Cooke Award for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Dr. Chen is a graduate of Yale University, Stanford University Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. Her training includes a primary care internal medicine residency and chief residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Commonwealth Fund Harvard University Fellowship in Minority Health Policy. She is an alumna of the California HealthCare Foundation Leadership Fellowship.

She previously served on the board of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network for six years and is currently a board member of the National Council of Asian & Pacific Islander Physicians, as well as a volunteer physician for Alameda County Public Health Department’s Project New Start, a tattoo removal program targeting at risk youth. She lives in Berkeley with her spouse David and their six-year old twins Anda and Duncan.

Implementation Science, People with limited English proficiency, Socioeconomically marginalized groups, Clinic, Hospital, Education, P4P, Practice guidelines, Medical home, Policy advocacy, electronic referrals to specialty care, primary care-specialty care interface, patient centered medical home, access for limited English proficient patients, cost consciousness, Interdisciplinary research collaboration, Works-in-progress seminars, Implementation & dissemination science listservs, Receiving mentorship in implementation science