Winthrop F. Whitcomb, MD

Winthrop F. Whitcomb has been a practicing hospitalist since 1994 at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, MA. He served as director of the Mercy Inpatient Medicine Service – America’s first and most widely emulated program with 24/7 on site hospitalist staffing – from 1994 through 2004. In 1996, he founded the Society of Hospital Medicine with John Nelson, MD, and co-directed the organization until 2000. Since 1996, he has been widely recognized as a principle leader of the U.S. hospitalist movement and the field of hospital medicine. He has worked with the Society of Hospital Medicine in virtually every facet of the organization and has lectured and written extensively on the hospitalist model. Dr. Whitcomb presently is a practicing hospitalist, serves as director of Performance Improvement at Mercy Medical Center, and director of Hospitalist Services for Catholic Health East – a 42 hospital system in the eastern U.S. He is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 2007, Dr. Whitcomb released two major texts in the field of hospital medicine: He is section editor of Comprehensive Hospital Medicine, a 135-chapter book published by Elsevier Health Sciences and he is coauthor of Hospitalists: A Guide to Establishing and Maintaining a Successful Hospitalist Program, a 300 page text jointly published by the American College of Healthcare Executives and Society of Hospital Medicine. Dr. Whitcomb has provided consultation to hospitalist programs throughout the United States since 1996.