Robert M. Wachter

Robert M. Wachter Bob Wachter in 2021
Born	1957 New York City, New York, US
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania, B.A., University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, MD
Scientific career
Institutions	University of California, San Francisco

Robert M. "Bob" Wachter is an academic physician and author. He is on the faculty of University of California, San Francisco, where he is chairman of the Department of Medicine, the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine, and the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine. In 2015, Modern Healthcare magazine named him the most influential physician-executive in the United States. Prior to becoming UCSF's ninth chair of medicine, he served as chief of UCSF's Division of Hospital Medicine.

He is generally regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement. Hospitalists are internists and other physicians who specialize in the care of hospitalized patients. He and a colleague, Lee Goldman, are known for coining the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.^[1] He is a past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and a past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

He is also a noted expert in the field of medical errors and patient safety. From 2002-2019, he edited the U.S. government's leading patient safety website, AHRQ Patient Safety Network. He has written two books on safety, Internal Bleeding and Understanding Patient Safety. In 2004, he won the John M. Eisenberg award, the nation's top honor in patient safety.

His book on healthcare technology, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2015, and became a New York Times science bestseller. In 2015-16, he chaired a group advising the National Health Service (England) on its digital strategy. The "Wachter Review," released in September, 2016, was highly influential, prompting the NHS to employ a staged approach to digital implementation, to develop a digital academy to train more clinician-informaticists, and to create a new leadership position, NHS Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO).

In 2020, his frequent tweets on COVID-19 were viewed over 200 million times by more than 160,000 followers and served as a source of information on clinical, public health, and policy issues surrounding the pandemic.

In January 2021, Wachter began guest-hosting the In the Bubble podcast.^[2]

Books[]

• "The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age" (2015)
• "Understanding Patient Safety, 2nd Edition" (2012)
• Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes (2005)

References[]

External links[]

• "Doctors are Tweeting about Coronavirus to Make Facts go Viral"" By Georgia Wells, "The Wall Street Journal", 2020.
• "Zero to 50,000: The 20th Anniversary of the Hospitalist" By Robert M. Wachter, MD and Lee Goldman, MD, 2016.
• "Making IT Work: Harnessing the Power of Health Information Technology to Improve Care in England" By Robert M. Wachter and the NHS Health IT Advisory Board, 2016.
• "Robert Wachter Discusses His New Book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age"
• "Review of "The Digital Doctor"" By Abigail Zuger, "The New York Times", 2015.
• "Why Health Care Tech is Still So Bad" By Robert M. Wachter, The New York Times, 2015.
• "Holding Doctors Accountable For Medical Errors" By Pauline Chen The New York Times, 2009.
• "The Emerging Role of “Hospitalists” in the American Health Care System" By Robert M. Wachter, MD and Lee Goldman, MD, 1996.
• "Balancing 'No Blame' with Accountability in Patient Safety" By Robert M. Wachter, MD and Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, 2009.

External links[]

• Robert M. Wachter on Twitter
• Appearances on C-SPAN