Patrick Sanger, MD, PhD

I studied architecture at Yale, on the design track, with an emphasis on computer-aided and graphic design. It taught me to see systems whole, and to care how information reaches the person who has to act on it.

I have been flying since 1996, in gliders, airplanes, and helicopters, and became a helicopter flight instructor in 2004. Aviation is a discipline of checklists, situational awareness, and calm decisions with incomplete information. Medicine asks for the same.

Before medical school I worked in a nutrition and metabolism laboratory at Children’s Hospital Oakland, on a study comparing the effects of Western and plant-based diets on the gut microbiome in mice. My role was data analysis and visualization, and it was my first experience of turning raw measurements into something a clinician could act on.

At the University of Washington I completed an MD and a PhD in biomedical and health informatics, supported by an NIH translational science fellowship. My dissertation built a mobile tool that let patients photograph and report on surgical wounds after leaving the hospital, with machine-learning models that predicted infection from those daily assessments.

I also led the development of an electronic surveillance tool that reads the medical record, including free-text notes, to identify catheter-associated urinary tract infections in real time. The hospital’s infection-control team adopted it for routine use.

I completed residency in primary care internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Health Systems Leadership pathway: quality improvement, root-cause analysis of medical error, and health-policy work. I was usually the one analyzing and visualizing the data.

I chose community practice over an academic career, closer to patients and to my own family. After several years as a primary care physician at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, I began a small, longitudinal practice in San Francisco. N of 1 Medicine is its most concentrated form.

I take the time to understand what matters to you before deciding what to test or treat. I read new research continually and revise my own approach when the evidence warrants it.

I often describe it this way: your body is your ship, and you are the captain. I serve as your first mate, bringing expertise, perspective, and navigation, while you determine the course.

I am particularly experienced with complex, high-acuity, and rapidly evolving health challenges: situations that call for intensive physician involvement, specialist coordination, close follow-through, and repeated revision of the plan.

I use AI every day for research, programming, and clinical decision support. Its output is working material until I have reviewed it, and I remain accountable for every conclusion. I also oversee information security for the practice.