Alice Chen, MD

Alice Hm Chen, MD, MPH is chief health officer at Centene Corporation, a leading healthcare enterprise committed to transforming the health of the communities it serves, one person at a time. At Centene, she is responsible for implementing strategies, policies and programs that improve population health for its more than 28 million members. Her career has focused on advancing the health of under-resourced communities through patient care, teaching, policy and leadership across health systems, public health, philanthropy, academia and government.

Prior to joining Centene Dr. Chen worked for the State of California, as chief medical officer at Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace, and as deputy secretary for policy and planning at the California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS). At Covered California she was responsible for health care strategy focused on quality, equity and delivery system transformation, and was instrumental in driving public purchaser alignment on quality, disparities and investments in primary care. 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 in the areas of strategic reopening, hospital surge planning, equity, data analytics and therapeutics.

She previously served as chief integration officer for Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and founding director of the eConsult program before becoming inaugural chief medical officer and deputy director for the San Francisco Health Network, the city’s $2 billion-a-year publicly funded integrated delivery system. A professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for fifteen years, she has published extensively, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs. Dr. Chen has served on the board of several nonprofits and foundations, and currently serves on 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 and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Her academic appointments include clinical professor of medicine at UCSF, senior scholar at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, and affiliate faculty at UCSF’s Institute for Health Policy Studies.