Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH

Urmimala Sarkar MD, MPH is Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Associate Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, and a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s Richard H. Fine People’s Clinic. Dr. Sarkar’s research focuses on innovating for health equity. Her research employs new tools like digital/ mobile health and social media to address to improve the safety and quality of outpatient care. She has expertise in medical errors and patient safety, diabetes, and cancer prevention and survivorship. This research incorporates collaboration with a range of expertise including design thinking/ usability testing, human factors engineering, data science, health services research, and implementation science.

She has conducted studies which explore the impact of health communication (health literacy, English proficiency) and health information technology on patient safety. Her prior studies on internet-based patient portals demonstrate digital disparities by race/ethnicity and health literacy. Her social media studies use mixed-methods approaches to understand patient perspectives about physician quality and about cancer screening behaviors. Her ongoing work employs varied health information technologies to detect and ameliorate adverse events among outpatient chronic disease populations. She is currently funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Cancer Institute, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, among others.