Dean Schillinger, M.D.

Dean Schillinger, M.D., is a practicing primary care physician at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), an urban public hospital, where he sees patients, teaches in the primary care residency program, and conducts research as a member of the UCSF Primary Care Research Center. In his administrative capacities, he has directed the Medi-Cal managed care clinic at SFGH, the ambulatory care clinics at SFGH, and has been the Director of Clinical Operations for the Department of Medicine. He is currently the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, a new research center committed to transforming clinical and public health practice and policy to improve health and health care for socially vulnerable people.

Dr. Schillinger has focused his research on health care for vulnerable populations, including the impact of managed care, improving systems of care for publicly insured and uninsured patients, and most recently, health communication.  His current work has focused on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management. He has carried out a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on the care of patients with diabetes and heart disease, and was honored with the 2003 Institute for Healthcare Advancement Research Award for this work. He was recently awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health, The California Endowment, the Commonwealth Fund, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the California Health Care Foundation, to develop and evaluate disease-management programs tailored to the literacy and language needs of patients with chronic disease, and is a co-investigator for the National Association of Public Health and Hospital Institute’s Diabetes Quality Improvement Consortium.

Dr. Schillinger contributed to the 2004 Institute of Medicine Report on Health Literacy, is a section editor for the textbooks Understanding Health Literacy (AMA press) and Caring for Vulnerable and Underserved Populations (Lange series, 2007), and is a former member of the American College of Physician’s Health Communication Advisory Board. He completed an Open Society Institute Advocacy Fellowship working with California Literacy, Inc., a non-profit educational organization that helps people gain literacy skills, to advance the California Health Literacy Initiative. He recently returned from a semester as Visiting Scholar at the University of Chile School of Public Health to help develop chronic disease prevention and treatment initiatives.