Hemal Kanzaria, MD

Professor

Hemal Kanzaria, MD, MSc, is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he holds the Terry A. Patinkin, MD, Endowed Professorship in Health Equity. He is the Chief of Performance Excellence at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG), where his focus is on organizational strategy and performance improvement.

Prior to his current role, he served as the Director of Complex Care Analytics for the San Francisco Health Network (2015-2019) and the Medical Director for the Department of Care Coordination at ZSFG (2019-2023). Through these roles, he supported the expansion and operationalization of a novel multi-agency integrated data systems to understand patients medical and non-medical needs; the implementation of the Emergency Department (ED) information exchange across the SF Department of Public Health; the development of an innovative multi-disciplinary Social Medicine team to address patients’ health-related social needs; and numerous care coordination efforts employing lean improvement principles to advance safe, efficient, and equitable patient care. He is also the founding Co-Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine Section of Social Emergency Medicine and Health Equity, and serves on the Board of Directors for the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

Dr. Kanzaria is a health services researcher, a decision editor for Annals of Emergency Medicine, and an Associate Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, where he co-leads the research hub COORDINATE HOME - CrOss-sectOR Data INtegrAtion To End HOMElessness. He is also Core Faculty in the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and Affiliated Faculty at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and the California Policy Lab. His research focuses on patient engagement, health-related social needs, homelessness, frequent users of the health care system, and delivery system transformation. He has published extensively on these topics and his work has been featured widely in the media.

A graduate of Brown University, UCSF School of Medicine, and the UCLA School of Public Health, Dr. Kanzaria’s training includes an emergency medicine residency at UCSF/ZSFG. He is an alum of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program and the California Health Care Foundation Leadership Program. Dr. Kanzaria is a practicing emergency physician at UCSF/ZSFG, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two daughters.