National health care and patient safety expert joins Salem Health Board of Trustees

The Salem Health Board of Trustees is pleased to announce that Dr. Robert M. Wachter, professor and associate chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has accepted an appointment to the Salem Board. Dr. Wachter is a national leader in the fields of patient safety and health care quality. He is the editor of AHRQ WebM&M (webmm.ahrq.gov), a case-based patient safety journal — and AHRQ Patient Safety Network (pnnet.ahrq.gov), the leading federal patient safety portal. The sites receive nearly one million visitors a year.

“We invited Dr. Wachter to join the Board in large part because of his national pre-eminence in the areas of quality and patient safety,” said Kenneth Sherman, Jr., Board chair. “Even though Dr. Wachter lives and works in San Francisco, he has been actively associated with Salem Health for several years through our Physician Leadership Institute. Bob Wachter will be an active, fully engaged member of the Board. We are very excited about the contributions he will make to the excellence of our hospital.”

Wachter looks forward to joining the board, stating, “I am profoundly interested in improving quality, safety, the patient's experience, and efficiency. The opportunity to contribute to this "value agenda" in an excellent community hospital system is exciting, and will help inform my thoughts about these efforts in my national work.”

Dr. Wachter has discussed patient safety and quality on ABC’s Good Morning America, PBS’s NewsHour, CNN’s American Morning, CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. He received one of the 2004 John M. Eisenberg Awards, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. He has been named one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S. by Modern Healthcare magazine for the past five years. His blog, wachtersworld.org, is one of the national’s most popular health care blogs.

Wachter 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 “father” of the hospitalist field — the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. Hospitalists are physicians whose primary professional focus is the general medical care of hospitalized patients — and their activities include patient care, teaching, research, and leadership related to Hospital Medicine.

Dr. Wachter has published over 250 articles and 6 books in the fields of quality, safety and health policy. He has written two bestselling books on patient safety: Understanding Patient Safety (2^nd edition, McGraw-Hill, 2012), and Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes (Rugged Land, 2004).

Wachter’s education includes a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1983 — and later an internship, residency and chief residency at UCSF from 1983 to 1988. He received licenses and certification from the National Board of Medical Examiners in 1984, the State of California beginning in 1984, and Diplomate: American Board of Internal Medicine in 1987 (and voluntary recertified in 2009). He is currently chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center, and Founding Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF. Wachter is clinically active, caring for inpatients on the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center two months each year.

Dr. Wachter’s current professional memberships include the AHRQ-funded National Initiative to Eliminate Catheter-Associated Bloodstream Infections, and the American Hospital Association National Advisory Council on Quality. He is also chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine in 2012-13.

All members of the Salem Health Board of Trustees are volunteers and serve three-year terms. The board provides overall policy setting for the health system, and is ultimately responsible for the quality of care and the financial well being of the organization. The board appoints members from a variety of backgrounds to ensure a broad representation of experience and skills.

Salem Health is comprised of Salem Hospital, West Valley Hospital, Willamette Health Partners and other affiliated health care organizations offering exceptional care to people in and around Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley. Visit us at salemhealth.org and facebook.com/salemhospital; follow us on Twitter: @salemhealth; and view us at youtube.com/user/salemhealth.