MEDICINE: What It Will Take To Get Back To Normal | Bob Wachter, MD

Recorded August 5th, 2020.

Our guest today is Dr. Bob Wachter from UCSF. The UC San Francisco grand rounds on COVID-19 have been incredibly helpful for physicians navigating this pandemic, and Bob has also been very active on Twitter helping to educate the medical community and the public about COVID-19.

Questions from this episode include:

• You wrote a great opinion piece about how and when life might start to return to normal during this pandemic. Can you give us an overview of your ideas that you outlined in the article?
• On a related note to life returning to normal, how do you see the COVID pandemic changing medicine in the future?
• We have had several discussions on this podcast about the health disparities that we are seeing during this pandemic. Can you tell us about what you are seeing and your thoughts about how we might begin to address this?

Your host is Dr. Ted O’Connell, family physician, educator, and author of numerous textbooks and peer-reviewed articles. He holds academic appointments at UCSF, UC Davis, and Drexel University's medical schools and also founded the Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano Community Medicine and Global Health Fellowship, the first program in the U.S. to formally combine both community medicine and global health. Follow Ted on Instagram (@tedoconnellmd) and Twitter (@tedoconnell)! 

Dr. Bob Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, where he is the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine and the Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine. The department leads the nation in NIH grants and is generally ranked as one of the nation’s best. Dr. Wachter is author of 250 articles and 6 books and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He coined the term “hospitalist” in 1996 and is often considered the father of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine. In the safety and quality arenas, he has written two books on the subject, including Understanding Patient Safety, the world’s top selling safety primer. In 2004, he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. Thirteen times, Modern Healthcare magazine has ranked him as one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S.; he was #1 on the list in 2015. His 2015 book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, was a New York Times science bestseller. In 2016, he chaired a blue-ribbon commission advising England’s National Health Service on its digital strategy. In 2020, his tweets on Covid-19 have been viewed over 50 million times by 100,000 followers and have served as a trusted source of information on the clinical, public health, and policy issues surrounding the pandemic.

Links for this episode

https://medicine.ucsf.edu/covid-19-news-coverage

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/providers/dr-robert-wachter

Twitter: @Bob_Wachter

LinkedIn: @robertwachter

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