I enjoy public speaking and give 50-75 talks each year at a variety of healthcare conferences around the country, and the world. These have included lectures and visiting professorships at major academic centers (including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Michigan, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, and many more), keynote lectures for many hospitals and health systems (including Kaiser Permanente, Tenet, HCA, Adventist, and Triad and more than two dozen health system and hospital boards), keynote lectures at several city or statewide safety coalitions (including MD, VA, West VA, CT, MN, WI, IN, WA, PA, and NY), and a yearly keynote lecture for the Society of Hospital Medicine’s annual meeting.
My talks tend to be engaging, provocative, iconoclastic, and, on a good day, humorous. My most popular topics/talks are:
1) “What We Need to Know and Do to Cure our Epidemic of Medical Mistakes.” A case-based, dramatic talk that describes a new way to think about medical errors and a new approach to this modern epidemic. The talk is suitable for novices, experts, and even lay audiences.
Related reading: Wachter RM, Shojania KG. Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes. New York: Rugged Land, 2004.
Wachter RM. Understanding Patient Safety. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
2) “Patient Safety Ten Years after the IOM Report on Medical Errors: Unmistakable Progress, Troubling Gaps.” A more policy-oriented talk than #1, and more appropriate for advanced audiences (leaders in quality and safety, for example). The talk chronicles what is working and not working (regulation, IT, teamwork training, workforce issues, accountability, etc.) in our efforts to prevent medical mistakes.
Related reading: Wachter RM. Patient safety at ten: Unmistakable progress, troubling gaps. Health Affairs 2010;29:165-73. Epub 2009 Dec 1.
3) "Balancing 'No Blame' and Accountability: The Key Issue for Patient Safety." The safety field has focused on a "no blame" approach to medical errors, which has been useful. But is a 50% hand hygiene rate still a "systems problem"? I argue that we need to strike a useful balance between these two poles if we are truly to make patients safer.
Related reading: Wachter RM, Pronovost PJ. Balancing 'no blame" and accountability in patient safety. New England Journal of Medicine 2009; 361:1401-6.
4) “Use Your Words: Understanding the New Vocabulary of Healthcare Reform.” The 2009-10 debate over healthcare reform introduced many new terms: “comparative effectiveness”, “bundling”, “Accountable Care Organizations”, “Death Panels", and more. In this talk, I help audiences make sense of these concepts, and, more importantly, what they mean in the larger context of our healthcare delivery system.
Related reading: Wachter RM. Understanding the new vocabulary of healthcare reform. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2010, in press.
5) “Consequences (Expected and Otherwise) of the Quality and Information Technology Revolutions.” The talk is a slightly contrarian view of these trends, two of the most dominant issues facing health care today. Audiences leave this talk thinking about these topics in a new, fresh way.
Related reading: Wachter RM. Expected and unanticipated consequences of the quality and information technology revolutions. Journal of the American Medical Association 2006; 295:2780-3.
6) “The Hospitalist Movement in 2010: Key Issues for the Second Decade.” I coined the term “hospitalist” in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. I cover the forces driving the growth of the field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine, and what the next decade has in store.
Related readings:
• Wachter RM, Goldman L. The emerging role of “hospitalists” in the American health care system. New England Journal of Medicine 1996; 335:514-7.
• Wachter RM and Goldman L. The hospitalist movement 5 years later. Journal of the American Medical Association 2002; 282:487-494.
• Wachter RM. Hospitalists in the United States: Mission accomplished or work-in-progress? New England Journal of Medicine 2004; 350:1935-6.
I am happy to accept individual speaking inquiries by email. I am also “handled” by several excellent speakers bureaus; they can help with arrangements: Eagles Talent, Speakers Platform, Washington Speakers Bureau, and Promenade Speakers Bureau.