Robert M. Wachter

Robert M. Wachter, MD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). A renowned futurist and thought leader in areas ranging from health policy to digital healthcare, he is the author of 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 bestselling safety primer.

Modern Healthcare magazine has ranked him as one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S. more than a dozen times; he was #1 on the list in 2015. His book that year, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2015-16, he chaired a blue-ribbon commission advising England’s National Health Service on its digital strategy. His eagerly anticipated new book, A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare – and What That Means for Our Future, will be published by Portfolio/Penguin in early 2016. 

Wachter graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine in 1983. He received the school’s Alumni of the Year award in 2015. He completed his residency and chief residency in internal medicine at UCSF, was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University in 1988-90, a Fulbright Scholar at Imperial College London in 2011, and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in 2014.