Robert M. Wachter, MD, Editor
Dr. Wachter is Professor and Associate Chairman of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also Chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center, where he directs UCSF's hospitalist program and chairs the UCSF Patient Safety Committee. In addition to his work on AHRQ WebM&M, he is also lead editor of "Quality Grand Rounds," a case-based series on medical errors and patient safety in the Annals of Internal Medicine. He was project director and co-editor of Making Healthcare Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices, produced for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and published in 2001. He has been a national leader in the hospitalist movement, having coined the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article, authored many of the key research studies, edited the main textbook in the field (Hospital Medicine, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2000), and served as the first elected President of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), the fastest growing physician professional society in the U.S.

Dr. Wachter received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a resident and chief resident in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University. Prior to his present positions, he served as the Program Director of the 6th International Conference on AIDS and the Director of UCSF's internal medicine residency training program. He has published over 100 articles and several books and monographs in the areas of clinical outcomes, medical ethics, health services research, medical education, and healthcare quality. His book (with Dr. Shojania) on medical errors, Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, was published by Rugged Land in early 2004.

Kaveh G. Shojania, MD, Deputy Editor
Dr. Shojania is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he spends approximately one-third of his time as a clinician-educator on the inpatient medical service and the rest as a researcher with an interest in quality measurement and patient safety.

Dr. Shojania was lead editor (and authored six chapters) of Making Healthcare Safer—the evidence report produced for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). This report received widespread attention, with over 50,000 copies downloaded or obtained in hardcopy from AHRQ within the first 6 months of its release in July 2001. More recently, Dr. Shojania was lead author of a commentary on the report appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Shojania also helped develop the case-based series focusing on patient safety, "Quality Grand Rounds," appearing in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Most recently, he co-authored (with Robert M. Wachter, MD) a book for a general audience on medical error and patient safety. Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes was published by ( Rugged Land ) in early 2004.

Dr. Shojania has published several papers on the topic of efficient strategies for searching the healthcare literature. The National Library of Medicine used the strategy reported in one of these papers as the basis for the systematic review filter in the Clinical Queries section of PubMed.

In addition to the above activities, Dr. Shojania sits on several local and national committees focusing on patient safety. In April 2002, he received the Young Investigator Award from the National Association of Inpatient Physicians, the professional association of the Nation's hospitalists.

Dr. Shojania received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba. He completed his residency at Harvard’s Brigham and Women's Hospital and a hospital medicine fellowship at UCSF prior to assuming his present roles. As of July, 2004, he will take up a position at the University of Ottawa and the Ontario Health Research Institute as a clinician-researcher focusing on patient safety and quality improvement.

Scott A. Flanders, MD, Associate Editor
Dr. Flanders is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, where he serves as Associate Division Chief of General Medicine for Inpatient Programs and Associate Director of Inpatient Programs for the Department of Internal Medicine. He is the Director of the University of Michigan’s Hospitalist Program. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and Director of UCSF's Hospitalist Residency Track. Dr. Flanders, in collaboration with other UCSF faculty, developed the content for the nation’s first Hospitalist Residency Track. This track has become a model that has been widely disseminated to other academic centers starting similar programs, and formed the basis of a recent chapter for the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) Manual. Dr. Flanders regularly consults with both academic and community hospitals on issues related to curriculum development in the inpatient setting.

Dr. Flanders was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Hospital Medicine (formerly NAIP), and was Editor of the organization’s newsletter, The Hospitalist from 1997 through 2003. The newsletter has a circulation of over 5000 and reaches hundreds of hospitalists in every state. He is also the Associate Editor of AHRQ's new Web M&M online journal of patient safety.

In addition to these activities, Dr. Flanders has been active in guideline development, quality improvement, and patient safety at UCSF and U of M. His research interests are related to hospitalists, dissemination of patient safety practices, and the diagnosis and treatment of lower respiratory infections. He speaks regularly at national conferences on hospitalists, community-acquired and nosocomial pneumonia.

Dr. Minichiello is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she serves as Associate Program Director for the Categorical Internal Medicine Residency. In this role, Dr. Minichiello has played a lead role in developing program-wide curricular projects, including implementing a new curriculum on hospital medicine, redesigning the format and content adopted by the house staff journal club, and establishing a formal mentoring program.

Dr. Minichiello is a member of UCSF’s Graduate Medical Education Committee and plays an active role in the Residency Advisory and Curricular Committee. She serves as the sole elected faculty advisor to UCSF's resident-run "Women in Medicine" group. While a chief resident at Yale, she conducted monthly quality assurance rounds, and identified and prepared illustrative cases for the monthly Morbidity and Mortality conferences.

Dr. Minichiello received her medical degree from the University of Massachusetts. She was a resident and chief resident in Internal Medicine at the Yale New-Haven Hospital and completed a fellowship in hospital medicine at UCSF.

Susan Nguyen, Editorial Assistant