Robert Wachter, M.D

The wired world of healthcare is our future. It’s up to us – as patients, physicians, policy makers, vendors, leaders and influencers – to not only make it happen, but make it work. Dr. Robert Wachter is helping champion the cause.

Named by Modern Healthcare as the most influential physician executive in the U.S. for 2015 and one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare, Dr. Wachter is a recognized thought leader in healthcare quality, safety and organization of care. A practicing physician, he is intimately familiar with and involved in both the promises and challenges related to the computerization of healthcare. His just-published book – "The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age" (April 2015) – offers an unvarnished view of the early days of healthcare’s transformation (a so-far untold story), and an insightful and provocative exploration of what it will take, from all of us, to successfully shift from "disruption" to "disruptive innovation".

Currently a visiting professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs the 60-physician Division of Hospital Medicine, Dr. Wachter coined the term "hospitalist" in 1996 and is generally regarded as the "father" of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine.

A speaker and writer renowned for his iconoclastic and often humorous insights into the transforming world of healthcare, Dr. Wachter’s blog, www.wachtersworld.org, is one of the nation’s most popular healthcare blogs. He edits the U.S. government’s two leading websites on safety – the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s WebM&M and PSNet – and is the author of 250 articles and six books, including two best-sellers on the subject of safety and quality: "Understanding Patient Safety"

Wachter is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine (1999-2000) and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (2012-2013). In 2004, he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. He is on the board of the Lucian Leape Institute of the National Patient Safety Foundation, and has also served on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google.