Robert M. Wachter MD

Dr. Robert Wachter is chief of UCSF’s medical service and chief of the UCSF Division of Hospital Medicine, the specialty that focuses on the care of hospitalized patients. His primary interests are health care quality, safety and policy. He is widely credited as the founder and academic leader of the hospitalist specialty in medicine, the fastest-growing specialty in U.S. medical history.

Wachter is an international leader in health care safety and quality. He is an editor of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an online patient safety journal, as well as AHRQ Patient Safety Network, the leading federal patient safety portal, which together receives 3 million yearly visits. He has published more than 200 articles and six books on health care topics, including two bestselling books on patient safety, Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes and Understanding Patient Safety. He writes regularly on health care policy, health care quality, hospitalists, and patient safety on his blog, Wachter's World.

Wachter received his medical degree at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at UCSF. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University, and he studied patient safety in England in 2011 as a Fulbright Scholar. He is chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine and past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine.