2025 Plenary Panel
AI’s Health Equity Potential in Family Medicine
Moderator: Dr. Megan Mahoney, UCSF FCM Chair
Panelists:
Dr. Rachel Summer Claire Friedman
Dr. Brent Sugimoto
Dr. Adrian Tomes
This year's plenary will explore the ways AI is reshaping family medicine, from research and advancing clinical innovation, to enhancing residency tools and curricula.
This panel will highlight how residency programs are leveraging AI to drive better patient outcomes, while also preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals for a future shaped by AI technologies.
Rachel Summer Claire Friedman, MD is the Program Director at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. She received her BA in History of Medicine from Harvard University and her MD and MHS degrees from Yale School of Medicine, before finding a more permanent sense of home and belonging in Sonoma County, where she completed family medicine residency and Integrative Medicine Fellowship at Sutter Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. In 2012, Dr. Friedman was recruited to become one of the founding faculty of the KP Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. As Associate Program Director from 2016-2023, she helped establish the program as an early adopter of telemedicine, patient advisory council involvement in resident selection, and holistic/inclusive evaluation practices. As Program Director since 2023, she continues to practice full-scope outpatient family medicine with a focus on weight-inclusive, gender-affirming, whole family care. She leads with a passion for systems-based solutions and a vision of residency training as a sandbox and training ground for the healthcare of the future. As such, she has supported faculty and residents in building projects and curricula around climate-forward practices, gender-affirming primary care, GIS mapping for closing healthcare gaps, lifestyle medicine visits, and growing awareness of our biases to be better doctors and educators. Dr. Friedman's leadership philosophy is based on the concept of emergent leadership and jazz improvisation—creating spaces for authentic connection, embracing our differences as a strength, and calling on collective wisdom to address the complex challenges facing healthcare today.
Brent K Sugimoto, MD, MPH, FAAFP
Program Director, LifeLong Medical Care Family Medicine Residency
Brent K Sugimoto, MD, MPH, FAAFP, is program director of the LifeLong Medical Care Family Medicine Residency Program and a Family Physician who specializes in HIV medicine. A “yonsei” (fourth generation Japanese-American) from Cerritos, California, Brent went on to graduate from the University of California, San Francisco and completed his Family Medicine residency at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, California. Brent ventured into artificial intelligence after the birth of his first child—when parenthood made him rethink the boundaries of his professional and personal lives—and co-founded a startup which leveraged technology from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build tools to make primary care sustainable. Since then, Brent has worked to increase family medicine’s engagement in AI/ML as a transformative and disruptive technology through physician education and policy work, focusing on primary care transformation and health equity. Brent currently serves as co-chair of the AAFP/Rock Health “Advancing AI and Digital Health for Primary Care Initiative” and is a member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education Task Force. He resides in Richmond, California.
Adrian Tomes, MD
Assistant Professor - UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine
UCSF Health Medical Director of Data Equity
Primary Care ApEX Physician Lead
Adrian Tomes, MD is a board-certified Family Physician and Clinical Informaticist at UCSF's Lakeshore Clinic. His professional roles include UCSF Health's Primary Care ApEX Physician Lead, Medical Director of Data Equity, incoming Medical Director of Risk Capture, and Family Medicine Residency Informatics Curriculum Design Lead. Born in Germany and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Dr. Tomes graduated from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 2017, completed residency at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis in 2020, and his Clinical Informatics fellowship at UCSF in 2024. Dr. Tomes’s areas of expertise include primary care informatics, health equity, and healthcare innovation. He launched UCSF’s Express Care service in October 2023, successfully providing on-demand, patient-initiated video visits for low-acuity primary care issues. As Medical Director of Data Equity, he co-chairs UCSF Health's Data Equity Task Force, overseeing equitable practices in data collection, usage, and reporting. His achievements include the Hellman Foundation Health Justice Scholars Award (2022) and the UCSF Watson Scholar Award (2024).