Alice Hm Chen, MD, MPH is executive vice president and chief health officer at Centene Corporation, the nation's largest Medicaid and Marketplace managed care organization, where she is responsible for strategies and programs that improve population health for its more than 27 million members. She has 35 years of clinical, policy and operational experience with a track record of improving access, quality, and affordability of care in provider, purchaser, and payer settings.
Prior to joining Centene, Dr. Chen was chief medical officer at Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace, where she led the establishment of the Quality Transformation Initiative, a multi-purchaser program resulting in significant improvements in key quality measures across the state. She previously worked as deputy secretary for policy and planning for the California Health and Human Services Agency, where she led the development of the Office of Health Care Affordability and state’s generic drug manufacturing for insulin initiative, and played a leadership role in the state’s response to COVID.
For over a decade Dr. Chen was a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, based at San Francisco General Hospital, where she served as founding director of the eConsult program and oversaw the ambulatory clinics as chief integration officer. She subsequently served as the inaugural chief medical officer of San Francisco’s $2B-a-year publicly funded, vertically integrated safety net delivery system, where she was the executive operations sponsor for the enterprise implementation of Epic and led the successful Medicaid waiver-supported transition to value-based payments.
Dr. Chen is a board-certified primary care internist who has published extensively, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs, and has been named one of Modern Healthcare’s 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives. She has served on the board of several non-profits including the Harvard University Board of Overseers and currently serves as co-chair of the CMS Innovation Center’s Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network’s Executive Forum. A graduate of Yale University, Stanford Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Chen holds a volunteer faculty appointment at UCSF.
