Robert M. Wachter
Dr. Robert M. Wachter, Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, holds the nation's first endowed chair in Hospital Medicine. He is also Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine, and Chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center. He has published 200 articles and six books in the fields of quality, safety, and health policy. He coined the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article and was the first elected President of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He is generally considered the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine.
Dr. Wachter is also a national leader in the fields of patient safety and healthcare quality. He is editor of AHRQ WebM&M, a case-based patient safety journal on the Web, and AHRQ Patient Safety Network, the leading federal patient safety portal. Together, the sites receive nearly two million visitors a year.
He has written two best-selling books on patient safety: Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes and Understanding Patient Safety. Most recently, he has published a second edition to Understanding Patient Safety, which has been hailed a "must for every physician's bookshelf." Dr. Wachter has discussed patient safety and quality on Good Morning America, PBS's NewsHour, "Imus in the Morning," CNN's American Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, and NPR's "Talk of the Nation," and has been quoted in virtually every major newspaper and newsmagazine. He received one of the 2004 John M. Eisenberg Awards, the nation's top honor in patient safety. He has been named three times as "one of the 30 most influential physician-executives in the US" by Modern Healthcare magazine (#23 in 2009, the top ranked academic physician on the list for the second year in a row). Dr. Wachter is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine and is on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google. His blog, www.wachtersworld.org, is one of the nation's most popular healthcare blogs.
Topics
Understanding Patient safety
For anyone seeking to learn the core clinical, organizational, and systems issues of patient safety, this keynote is filled with valuable information and tools designed to make the patient safety field understandable to medical, nursing, pharmacy, hospital administration, and other trainees. Dr. Wachter delivers key insights to help you understand and prevent a broad range of errors, including those related to medications, surgery, diagnosis, infections, and nursing care. He will provide a practical overview of how to organize an effective safety program, in both hospitals and clinics.
What We Need to Know and Do to Cure our Epidemic of Medical Mistakes
A case-based, dramatic talk that describes a new way to think about medical errors and a new approach to this modern epidemic. It is the Cliff Notes version of Wachter’s best-selling book, Internal Bleeding, and can be paired with a book-signing event. This keynote speech is suitable for novices, experts, and even lay audiences.
The End of the Beginning: Patient Safety Ten Years after the IOM Report on Medical Errors
A policy-oriented speech, this keynote is more suitable for advanced audiences (leaders in quality and safety, for example). The keynote speech chronicles what is working and not working (regulation, IT, teamwork training, workforce issues, accountability, etc.) in our efforts to prevent medical mistakes.
The Tension Between 'Accountability' and 'No Blame': The Key Conundrum in the Patient Safety Field.
Every hospital is struggling with how to balance these two seemingly competing approaches to patient safety. In this talk, Wachter describes the arguments for the two approaches, and lays out a balanced model that embraces "no blame" and systems thinking when it is the right strategy, but does not shy away from accountability as the appropriate response to clinicians’ failure to heed key safety practices.
Consequences (Expected and Otherwise) of the Quality and Information Technology Revolutions
In this slightly contrarian keynote on the consequences of the quality and information technology revolutions, two of the most dominant issues facing health care today. Most talks on these issues are dry and pat; clinical audiences leave this talk thinking about these topics in a new, fresh way.
The Hospitalist Movement 10 Years Later: Key Issues for the Second Decade
Wachter coined the term "hospitalist" in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. In this keynote, Wachter covers the forces driving the growth of the field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine, and what the next decade has in store.
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Materials
Book: Internal Bleeding
Book: Understanding Patient Safety
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