William Owen, MD: SFMS December 2013 Member of the Month January 9, 2014 Member of the Month, SFMS Member SFMS Member of the Month, William Owen 0 William F. Owen Jr, MD, maintains a private practice in internal medicine and HIV Medicine in San Francisco’s Castro District. He has been a SFMS member since 1980 and also serves as an active staff member at CPMC. Dr. Owen wrote one of the first review articles about health care issues of gay men that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1980 and has been an author of numerous other articles in the areas of gay health care and HIV Medicine. He was a founder, in 1977, of Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights (BAPHR), one of the first organizations of gay doctors in the U.S. His honors include the American Society of Internal Medicine Special Recognition Award and the naming of The Owen Clinic at the University of California, San Diego in recognition of his work with gay patients. Dr. Owen received both his undergraduate and medical degree from Temple University. His postgraduate training included a residency at Baystate Medical Center/Tufts University in Springfield, Massachusetts and a fellowship in emergency medicine at University of California, San Francisco. He is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and is credentialed as an HIV specialist by the American Academy of HIV Medicine. Click here to learn more about Dr. Owen's practice. I am a SFMS member because I believe that it is essential for physicians to be united in our task to ensure that we continue to provide the best quality care in the world for our patients in this era of rapidly changing modes of health care delivery. My commitment to being part of organized medicine started early in my career. I first became aware of SFMS in the 1970s in the wake of the assassinations of openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The President of SFMS at the time, Dr. Laurens P. White, reached out to a new organization of young gay physicians, residents, and medical students (Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights [BAPHR]), of which I was a founding member, and invited us to hold our monthly meetings at the SFMS headquarters. I think the most helpful SFMS member resource is SFMS’ print and online communication to keep members stay up to date on the changing economicclimate in medicine and legislative changes that might affect our patients. My staff also continues to find the SFMS Physician Directory and the SFMS Referral Service to be invaluable resources for our practice. What are some of the biggest opportunities or challenges you see in health care within the next five years? Currently, integrating our use of electronic health records (EHR) is proving to be a much greater challenge than I could ever have imagined. However, at the end of the EHR rainbow is the promise of being able to provide better care for our patients, particularly in the realm of preventive medicine. The other big challenge will come with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2014. The intended effect of ACA is to provide continuity of health care and preventive care to most of our population; however, with our current shortage of primary care providers, there is likely to be a lot of strains in the system on the road to that lofty goal. I love being a primary care provider specializing HIV Medicine because it’s very seldom that we in medicine have the privilege of watching the explosion of a mysterious and fearsome epidemic strike down young people in the prime of life, and then have the opportunity to witness our basic science colleagues determining the etiologic agent of that epidemic, and finally, have the incredible satisfaction of prescribing treatments that allow our patients to have normal life spans today. As a humanitarian, scientist, and clinician, it is an extraordinary honor to have had the opportunity to practice medicine during this amazing era. What is your favorite restaurant in San Francisco? Wow! That may be the toughest question of all! I’ve read that we San Franciscans have the highest per capita rate of dining out of residents of any city, beating even Manhattanites! I guess that confers upon all San Franciscans the honorific of “foodie extraordinaire.” All I can say is that I personally have very eclectic tastes and love to try any new restaurant, spanning as many different cuisines as you can imagine. If I wasn't a physician, I would like to be working with a small startup whose primary mission was to improve peoples’ lives and health. I really admire the thousands of young people moving to San Francisco who are using their entrepreneurial visions to develop the next great startup and grow our regional economy. Comments are closed.
