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 healthcare 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, equity, data analytics and therapeutics.

She has a long history of leadership in enhancing access and quality of care for vulnerable communities through patient care, teaching, policy and advocacy, delivery system innovation, and administrative leadership across a variety of settings, including community health, philanthropy and academia. For 15 years, Dr. Chen was a professor of medicine at 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 healthcare services. During her tenure she served as executive operations sponsor for the network’s implementation of Epic as its enterprise electronic health record and led the transition to population health and value-based payments.

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 Soros Physician Advocacy Fellowship, 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.