

UCSF Chair of Medicine, father of the hospitalist movement, and national bestselling author
When Dr. Robert Wachter names a trend, it becomes a movement. In 1996 he coined the term “hospitalist,” and the field it described became the fastest-growing medical specialty in U.S. history. Today he is widely regarded as its father.
His New York Times bestseller The Digital Doctor exposed what happens when technology meets medicine. His new national bestseller, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, draws on more than a hundred interviews with pioneers across medicine, technology, policy, and business. Steering between hype and skepticism, Wachter shows that in a system strained by burnout and rising costs, AI doesn’t have to be perfect, only better.
Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, one of the nation’s top-ranked academic medical departments. He earned his MD from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, completed his internal medicine residency and served as chief resident at UCSF, and trained as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford. He later studied patient safety in England as a Fulbright Scholar.
He has authored about 300 articles and six books, and he is a past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and a past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine. Modern Healthcare has named him one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S. more than a dozen times, including #1 in 2015.
Dr. Wachter’s new book is an indispensable road map for leaders, clinicians, and patients, and when Wachter speaks, healthcare listens.
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