Robert M. Wachter, MD is Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he holds the Lynne and Marc Benioff 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 250 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, is a past-president of the Society of Hospital Medicine, and edited the field’s first textbook (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, the leading federal patient safety portal. Together, the sites receive over three million unique visits each year. His book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, received glowing reviews and was a national bestseller. His book, Understanding Patient Safety, is the leading primer in the field; a new edition will be published in 2012. Dr. Wachter has discussed patient safety and healthcare quality on Good Morning America, PBS’s NewsHour, CNN’s American Morning, and CBS Sunday Morning and been quoted in virtually every major newspaper and newsmagazine. He received one of the 2004 John M. Eisenberg Awards, the nation’s top honor in patient safety and quality. In 2011, he was named the 24th most influential physician-executive in the U.S. by Modern Healthcare magazine, the fourth year in a row in which he was the most highly ranked academic physician on the list (and the top blogger!). He is Chair-elect of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and has served on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google. In 2011, he was a US-UK Fulbright Scholar, studying patient safety and the organization of hospital care at Imperial College London.
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