Bob Wachter

You're still a practicing clinician as well.

Is that true?

Correct.

About one month a year, I do this thing, a field that I actually started called hospitalist.

So about one month a year, I take care of very sick people in the hospital.

What's your medical specialty by training?

I trained in internal medicine, then did fellowship training in epidemiology and policy and ethics.

But I'm an internal medicine doctor, which in the old days meant you took care of patients in clinic and in the hospital.

And then in part because of this specialty that I kind of cooked up about 30 years ago, those things have gotten divided.

And we have separate doctors for the most part who take care of hospitalized patients.

That's what I do.

And how did you become a hospitalist and then kick off this field of hospitalists?

Was it just because you were doing internal medicine in a hospital and you kind of expanded that practice?

Yeah, I had a boss who's a very smart, strategic guy who said the way we organize hospital care is the way we've done it for 100 years.

And that can't be right.

Let's think of a new way of organizing hospital care.

Because at the time, the typical model was your doctor who took care of you in clinic also took care of you in the hospital, which makes some sense from a continuity standpoint, but just can't work.

It's got a physics problem.

You can't be in two places at the same time.

And if you think about it, the fields of emergency medicine and critical care medicine didn't exist 50 years ago.