PROSPECT Lab @ ZSFG

Pioneering Research and Organizational Solutions to Promote Equitable Care through Technology

We are the digital innovation team at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital with the mission of applying technology and digital tools to improve health outcomes and equity in vulnerable and underserved populations. Our team is composed of experts in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, informatics, building and analytics within the electronic health record, health equity and social determinants of health. We utilize Lean and implementation science to deploy our technology in healthcare environments serving vulnerable and underserved populations. For more details, read the ZSFG Predictive Analytics Report.

Contact us at prospect at-sign sfdph dot org.

News

  • January 2026: Our team is looking for a (senior) AI engineer! If you are interested, please check out the posting here.
  • December 2025: Our research exploring how AI could help social workers review patient records more efficiently was presented at the NeurIPS GenAI4Health workshop and accepted for oral presentation at AAAI, one of the leading artificial intelligence research conferences. The work investigates methods for summarizing complex medical and social information so care teams could spend more time with patients and less time searching through charts. Congrats to the team, and a big thank you to the ZSFG social work staff who helped shape this project. Read the paper here.
  • December 2025: Congrats to the team on having its work on building compact, transparent AI models for healthcare accepted at NeurIPS, a top venue for machine learning research. The method, BC-LLM, learns fully-interpretable risk prediction models that clinicians can use at the bedside, by learning concepts that are commonly mentioned in unstructured clinical notes. Read more here.
  • March 23-24, 2025: We convened the first Safety-Net Hospital AI Symposium, which was generously hosted by the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation and funded by America's Essential Hospitals. We had five safety-net hospitals come together, each representing different regions across the U.S., to discuss each institution's AI strategy and how our groups can collaborate to ensure AI also serves vulnerable patient populations and low-resource hospitals. Participating members of the symposium were ZSFG (CA), Parkland (TX), Grady (GA), Spartanburg (SC), and Eskenazi (IN).
  • December 2024: Congrats to Luke and the team for recieving the CAPH/SNI Quality Leaders Award in Health Equity Award for the work in using AI and EHR automation tools to improve health outcomes at ZSFG and the San Francisco Health network. The Equity Award addresses inequities in underserved populations by advancing organizational and/or health equity improvement efforts. Read the press release here and watch the video here.
  • October 2024: Dr. Luke Zier was interviewed by ABC7 News on PROSPECT Lab’s recently completed initiative using of AI to improve heart failure outcomes. The initiative reduced readmission rates, reduced heart failure mortality rates and closed equity gaps in care between the Black/African American patients with heart failure and the general heart failure population. View the video here (starts at 29:24)
  • May 2024: Congrats to Luke and the team for recieving the ZSFG Performance/Quality Improvement Award for the work on standardizing inpatient heart failure care! Read about it here.