Dr. Michael Wasserman

Geriatrician, Editor-in-Chief, Geriatric Medicine: A Person-Centered Evidence Based Approach

Doctor Michael Wasserman is a geriatrician who has devoted his career to serving the needs of older adults. He has been a tireless advocate for vulnerable older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, with multiple publications and television appearances. He served as a member of the National Academy of Science’s “A Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus” Committee. He is Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s upcoming textbook, Geriatric Medicine: A Person-Centered Evidence Based Approach. He previously served as Chief Executive Officer for Rockport Healthcare Services, overseeing the largest nursing home chain in California. Prior to that, he was the Executive Director, Care Continuum, for Health Services Advisory Group, the Quality Improvement Organization for California. In 2001 he co-founded Senior Care of Colorado, which became the largest privately owned primary care geriatrics practice in the country, before selling it in 2010. Springer published his book, “The Business of Geriatrics,” in 2016, which details how to succeed in Geriatrics in today’s healthcare marketplace.

In the 1990’s he was President and Chief Medical Officer for GeriMed of America, a Geriatric Medical Management Company, and developed GeriMed’s Clinical Glidepaths in conjunction with Drs. Flaherty and Morley of St. Louis University’s School of Medicine Geriatric Division. In 1989, in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Doctor Wasserman published “Fever, White Blood Cells and Differential Count in Diagnosing Bacterial Infection in the Elderly,” the findings of which are now part of the McGeer Criteria, used widely in nursing homes to evaluate residents for infections.

Dr. Wasserman is a graduate of the University of Texas, Medical Branch. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a Geriatric Medicine Fellowship at UCLA.He spent five years with Kaiser-Permanente in Southern California where he founded Kaiser’s first outpatient Geriatric Consult Clinic. Dr. Wasserman was a co-founder and owner of Common-Sense Medical Management (CSM2), a case management company that helped manage high risk beneficiaries of Cover Colorado. He is past chair of the American Geriatrics Society’s (AGS) Managed Care Task Force.

He was formerly a Public Commissioner for the Continuing Care Accreditation Commission. Dr. Wasserman was a co-founder of MESA (Medicare Experts and Senior Access) a multiyear grant from the Colorado Health Foundation to train primary care physicians in how to effectively care and bill for Medicare patients.

He was the lead delegate from the State of Colorado to the 2005 White House Conference on Aging. He also co-chaired the Colorado Alzheimer’s Coordinating Council.