Dr. Michael Potter is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and he completed his residency in family medicine and clinical research training at the University of California School of Medicine. In 1994, Dr. Potter joined the UCSF faculty, where he is now a professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine.
At UCSF, Dr. Potter sees patients, teaches medical students, and directs a regional primary health care practice-based research network. Dr. Potter is an implementation scientist whose research has focused broadly on interventions to improve team-based care and address health disparities in resource limited primary care settings, including work on hypertension, diabetes, chronic pain, sickle cell disease, smoking cessation, and cancer screening.
He has been engaged in colorectal cancer screening research and advocacy for more than 15 years. With research funding from the American Cancer Society and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Potter developed the FluFIT Program (flufit.org), a simple program which leverages the time of annual influenza vaccination as an opportunity for health care teams to educate and offer colorectal cancer screening to eligible patients. The FluFIT Program has been implemented in diverse health settings in all 50 states and has received numerous awards for innovation.
Dr. Potter is a former Steering Committee member or the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable (nccrt.org) and served as co-chair of the NCCRT Professional Education and Practice Implementation Committee for many years. In these roles, he participated in the development of the “80%-by-18” campaign and helped lead the development of numerous NCCRT clinical tools and resources.
As an associate member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, he currently co-leads the Colorectal Cancer Task Group of the San Francisco Cancer Initiative and provides leadership for a UCSF-Mexico partnership to develop and evaluate the first ever population-based colorectal cancer screening programs in Mexico City.