He is generally regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine.

He and a colleague, Lee Goldman, are known for coining the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.

[2] In 2011, Wachter studied patient safety and hospital medicine at Imperial College London as a Fulbright Scholar.

[3] He was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in 2015, where he studied and wrote about the digital transformation of healthcare.

His tweets on Covid-19 were viewed over 300 million times by more than 250,000 followers and served, for some, as a trusted source[citation needed] of information on the clinical, public health, and policy issues surrounding the pandemic.