University of San Francisco California
Damon Francis, MD
Alameda Health System
Dr. Francis joined Health Leads after five years in the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency in the East San Francisco Bay Area, where he worked on all aspects of the Agency’s vision for “healthy people, places, policies and systems.”
As interim director and medical director of Health Care for the Homeless, Dr. Francis led the adoption and expansion of clinical models addressing the whole person including medical, behavioral, and social needs. Much of his work leveraged new funding opportunities under the Affordable Care Act. His roles in the program ranged from clinician to manager to payer, allowing him to experience both the bewildering complexity of health care payment models, and the awesome diversity of human resilience.
Previously, Dr. Francis served as the medical director of the Urban Male Health Initiative, where he worked to reduce health disparities affecting men of color, providing policy analysis and representing the public health department in cross-governmental initiatives and public-private partnerships related to housing, criminal justice, and clinical quality improvement. His efforts supported several successful initiatives including a substantial shift of criminal justice spending from incarceration to evidence-based community interventions, and a county-wide initiative to coordinate, expand, and prioritize permanent supportive housing for the most vulnerable residents.
Dr. Francis has also worked at the East Bay AIDS Center in Oakland, California. where he spearheaded the development of the CRUSH project, a clinic providing sexual health services to young men of color who have sex with men. He helped drive innovations such as marketing through social networks, providing strong peer supports, and involving patients in clinic design, each of which has led to improvements in care for a group that has historically been served very poorly by the healthcare system.
Dr. Francis is an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where he completed medical school and residency in primary care internal medicine and served as chief resident for the internal medicine service at San Francisco General Hospital. His clinical experience since residency includes inpatient and outpatient practice in public, private, and academic settings, and he continues to provide urgent care at a community clinic in Oakland.