One of the mantras of performance improvement is that caregivers and provider organizations should learn from their experiences. That’s all well and good, but how about policy-setting organizations? A few moments ago in the on-line version of the New England Journal of Medicine, two of the Biggest Kahunas in the safety and quality worlds – the ...

It’s that time again – here’s the brochure and course information for the Management of the Hospitalized Patient (MHP) conference, October 14-16 at the Fairmont Hotel in beautiful, fog-free (at least in October) San Francisco. This will be our 14th annual hospital medicine conference; the first, attended by about 100 hardy hospitalist pioneers ...

I vividly recall attending a faculty meeting at San Francisco General Hospital in the mid-1990s, soon after I joined the UCSF faculty. Our late, great chief of medicine Merle Sande was chronicling all the recent and predicted changes in the healthcare landscape: managed care, more transparency, new regulations, and more. The meeting turned glum; ...

From Tokyo, I flew on to Singapore, where I had the honor of being visiting professor at the massive (1500-bed) Singapore General Hospital, a guest of Dr. Kheng Hock Lee. Kheng Hock, one of Singapore’s leading family physicians, has been charged with developing Singapore’s hospitalist program. Having last been to Singapore 20 years ago, many ...

In a little over a decade, the field of hospital medicine has achieved most of the milestones that characterize a specialty: the field is the fastest growing specialty in medical history, it has achieved wide recognition and acceptance, and there are textbooks, journals, conferences (including my 13th annual CME conference in SF beginning ...

If for some reason you haven't gotten enough of me on Wachter's World, I just did a long, fun interview with Matthew Holt on the always-interesting THCB. We cover patient safety, the future of IT, the demise of primary care, Death Panels, and more. I began the interview an optimist and finished it a pessimist, as I reflected on the ongoing ...

A quick note to let you know about my 13th annual Hospital Medicine CME course, September 24-26 at the Fairmont Hotel in SF. The big news this year is the keynote speaker: Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Many folks have asked me how I managed to line up Captain Sully for the ...

A paper in today’s New England Journal proves what we all know – the hospitalist field is the only thing growing faster than the national debt. Even though that’s not news, this elegant biopsy of the Medicare database offers some new insights about our field, the fastest growing specialty in medical history. Briefly, the study used a methodology ...

A study in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine by Vinny Arora and colleagues found that vanishingly few hospitalized patients could name any of their hospital doctors. Should we care? I think we should. Vinny is one of the nation’s up-and-coming researchers in the field of hospital medicine, and a good friend. In this clever study, she and ...

The Institute of Medicine just released its long-awaited report on trainee duty hours. It is well researched and balanced, and its recommendations appropriately reflect what we know vs. what we believe. Now the fun begins. Let’s start with a little background, some of it drawn from my book Understanding Patient Safety: Let’s be honest. ...