Robert Wachter, MD

Robert M. Wachter is Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he holds the nation’s first endowed chair in Hospital Medicine. He is also Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine, and Chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center. He has published 200 articles and 6 books in the fields of quality, safety, and health policy. He coined the term “hospitalist” in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article, and is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He is generally considered the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine.

He is also a national leader in the fields of patient safety and healthcare quality. He is editor of AHRQ WebM&M, a case-based patient safety journal on the Web, and AHRQ Patient Safety Network (PSNet), the leading federal patient safety portal. Together, the sites receive nearly two million visitors a year. He has written two bestselling books on patient safety: Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes (Rugged Land, 2004), and Understanding Patient Safety (McGraw-Hill, 2008). Dr. Wachter has discussed patient safety and quality on Good Morning America, PBS’s NewsHour, Imus in the Morning, CNN’s American Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, and NPR’s Talk of the Nation,and been quoted in virtually every major newspaper and newsmagazine. He received one of the 2004 Eisenberg Awards, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. In 2010, he was named the 10th most influential physician-executive in the U.S. by Modern Healthcare magazine, the third year in a row in which he was the most highly ranked academic physician on the list. Modern Healthcare also ranked him as one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine and has served on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google and Epocrates. His blog, Wachter’s World, is one of the nation’s most popular healthcare blogs.