Robert Wachter, MD

Robert M. Wachter, MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The department is generally ranked among the top handful in the U.S. and is the nation’s leading recipient of NIH grants. Wachter is author of approximately 300 articles and 6 books. He coined the term “hospitalist” in 1996 and is often considered the “father” of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine. In the safety and quality arenas, he has written two books on the subject, including Internal Bleeding and Understanding Patient Safety, the world’s best selling safety primer, now in its third edition. In 2004, he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. In 2015, Modern Healthcare magazine ranked him as the most influential physician-executive in the U.S.; he has been on the yearly 50 most influential list 13 times. He has served on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google and Teledoc. His 2015 book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, was a New York Times science bestseller. In 2016, he chaired a blue ribbon commission advising England’s National Health Service on its digital strategy.