Jeff Fox, MD, MPH, AGAF
“Dr. Fox is a trusted and outstanding clinician, which is foundational to his leadership. He leads with compassion and has built a department of dedicated and committed physicians and staff.”
Naveen Kumar, MD, Physician-in-Chief, KP San Rafael
When wildfires licked the edges of KP Santa Rosa in 2017 and forced the medical center’s gastrointestinal (GI) unit to close for over a month, Chief of Gastroenterology Jeff Fox, MD, mobilized a team of volunteer physicians and staff from across the region to perform procedures on weekends at nearby KP facilities, so that care would not be delayed for Santa Rosa patients.
And a few years later during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fox led a regionwide effort to develop strategies for continuing to provide life-saving procedures while ensuring the safety of clinicians, staff, and patients.
“My ultimate objective as a leader is to create a space where patients can receive the best care from providers who feel empowered and have agency,” says Dr. Fox, TPMG Chair of Gastroenterology.
Under Dr. Fox’s two decades of leadership, TPMG launched myriad new GI initiatives regionwide, including the expansion of fecal immunochemical testing to people between ages 45 and 49, genetic colorectal cancer screening, niche clinics for less common GI concerns, centers of excellence for interventional endoscopy, programs serving patients with lower-GI motility disorders and inflammatory bowel diseases, and a gastroenterology fellowship.
“We were thinking of new ways to fill the next generation of physicians for our GI departments,” Dr. Fox says, “and we figured there’s no better way than to train them ourselves.”