Robert M. Wachter

Robert M. Wachter, MD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Author of 300 articles and six books, Wachter 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, past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. In 2015, Modern Healthcare magazine ranked him as the most influential physician-executive in the US. 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 2020–2023, Dr. Wachter’s tweets on COVID-19 were viewed more than 500 million times by 275,000 followers and served as a trusted source of information on the clinical, public health, and policy issues surrounding the pandemic.