Hemal Kanzaria, MD

Hemal Kanzaria, MD, MSc, is the Terry A. Patinkin, MD, Endowed Professor of Health Equity and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF. He serves on the executive team at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG) as Chief of Performance Excellence, where he oversees the Kaizen Promotion Office and is responsible for advancing organizational strategy and performance improvement. His work focuses on aligning strategic planning and deployment across ZSFG; enabling staff through improvement science education and coaching—including formal classroom instruction, at-the-elbow operational support, and a fellowship program for mid-career physician and managers; advancing the integration of metrics, analytics, and data across the organization; guiding the strategic direction of the Prospect Lab (https://zsfg-prospect.github.io/index.html), which applies data science and advanced analytics to complex system challenges; and driving measurable improvements in care delivery for both patients and colleagues.

Prior to his current role, Dr. Kanzaria served as Director of Complex Care Analytics for the San Francisco Health Network (2015–2019) and as Medical Director / Associate Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Care Coordination at ZSFG (2019–2023). In these roles, he helped expand and operationalize a novel multi-agency integrated data system to better understand patients’ medical and non-medical needs; implemented the Emergency Department information exchange across the San Francisco Department of Public Health; co-founded and co-developed an innovative, multidisciplinary Social Medicine team to address health-related social needs; and led numerous care coordination efforts using Lean improvement principles to advance safe, efficient, and equitable care.

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 Action Research Center (ARC) for Health Equity and affiliated faculty at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies, the California Policy Lab, and the Public Policy Institute of California. His research focuses on patient engagement, health-related social needs, homelessness, frequent users of the healthcare system, improvement science, and delivery system transformation. He has published extensively on these topics, and his work has been featured widely in the media.

Dr. Kanzaria is 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.

A graduate of Brown University, UCSF School of Medicine, and the UCLA School of Public Health, Dr. Kanzaria completed his emergency medicine residency at UCSF/ZSFG. He is an alumnus of both 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, their two daughters, and rescue dog.

To learn more about Dr. Kanzaria, please visit https://profiles.ucsf.edu/hemal.kanzaria 

Board Certification: American Board of Emergency Medicine