Dr. Robert Wachter, a pioneer in the field of hospitalist medicine, has been elected to board of directors of IPC the Hospitalist Co., a North Hollywood, Calif.-based hospital medicine and physician group practice company operating in 28 states.
Wachter, a professor and associate chair at the University of California at San Francisco who just finished his term as chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine, will chair the IPC board's quality committee.
“For the past several years, my UCSF colleagues and I have collaborated with IPC to deliver a world-class training program to the company's emerging leaders, and I have been impressed by the organization's steadfast commitment to improvement,” Wachter said in a news release. “IPC's 1,400 hospitalists now have more than 6 million patient encounters each year—about 16,000 each day—in hospitals and post-acute-care facilities throughout the country. Joining IPC's board of directors provides me an unmatched opportunity to help shape the future of healthcare—to make things better for patients, for physicians and for the healthcare system.”
Wachter is also chief of the division of hospital medicine at UCSF Medical Center. In an e-mail, he said his new post does not conflict with his role at the medical center.
“At UCSF, we have a highly successful home-grown division of 60 hospitalists, who make amazing contributions in clinical care as well as education, research, QI , leadership, IT and more,” Wachter said. “I'm quite confident that this is a model that works well for us, and I wouldn't think that the teaching services of big academic medical centers will turn out to be IPC's core market.”
Wachter is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine, and is credited with creating the term “hospitalist” in 1996 to describe physicians who provide general care to hospitalized patients.
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