Dr. Alice Hm Chen is Chief Health Officer for Centene, the largest Medicaid and Marketplace managed care organization in the U.S., where she is responsible for strategies, policies, and programs in support of improving population health for its more than 26 million members.

Prior to joining Centene, Dr. Chen worked for the State of California, first as deputy secretary for policy and planning for the California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS), and subsequently as chief medical officer at Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace. At CHHS 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. At Covered California she was responsible for health care strategy focused on quality, equity, and delivery system transformation.

She has a long history of advancing access and quality of care for under-resourced 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 fifteen 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 health care services.

Dr. Chen has published extensively, 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 most recently served 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.

Proficient in Mandarin and Spanish, she holds an appointment as clinical professor of medicine at UCSF.