I enjoy public speaking and give 50-75 talks each year at a variety of healthcare conferences around the country, and the world. These have included lectures and visiting professorships at major academic centers (including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Michigan, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, and many more), keynote lectures for many hospitals and health systems (including Kaiser Permanente, Tenet, HCA, Adventist, and Triad and more than a dozen health system and hospital boards), keynote lectures at several city or statewide safety coalitions (including Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Connecticut, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York), and a yearly keynote lecture for the Society of Hospital Medicine’s annual meeting.
My talks tend to be engaging, iconoclastic, and, on a good day, humorous. My most popular topics/talks are:
1)
“Internal Bleeding: What We Need to Know and Do to Cure our Epidemic of Medical Mistakes.” A case-based, dramatic talk that describes a new way to think about medical errors and a new approach to this modern epidemic. It is the Cliff Notes version of my bestselling book,
Internal Bleeding, and some conferences like to pair it with a book-signing event. The talk is suitable for novices, experts, and even lay audiences.
Related reading: Wachter RM, Shojania KG.
Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes. New York: Rugged Land, 2004.
Wachter RM.
Understanding Patient Safety. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
2)
“The End of the Beginning: Patient Safety Eight Years after the IOM Report on Medical Errors.” A more policy-oriented talk than #1, and more appropriate for advanced audiences (leaders in quality and safety, for example). The talk chronicles what is working and not working (regulation, IT, teamwork training, workforce issues, accountability, etc.) in our efforts to prevent medical mistakes.
Related reading: Wachter RM.
The end of the beginning: Patient safety five years after ‘To Err is Human.’ Health Affairs, November 30, 2004; W4: 534-45.
3)
“Consequences (Expected and Otherwise) of the Quality and Information Technology Revolutions.” The talk is a slightly contrarian view of these trends, two of the most dominant issues facing health care today. Audiences leave this talk thinking about these topics in a new, fresh way.
Related reading: Wachter RM.
Expected and unanticipated consequences of the quality and information technology revolutions.
Journal of the American Medical Association 2006; 295:2780-3.
4)
“The Hospitalist Movement 10 Years Later: Key Issues for the Second Decade.” I coined the term “hospitalist” in the
New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. I cover the forces driving the growth of the field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine, and what the next decade has in store.
Related readings:
I am happy to accept individual speaking inquiries by
email. I am also “handled” by several excellent speakers’ bureaus; they can help with arrangements:
Eagles Talent, Speakers Platform, and Washington Speakers Bureau.