William S. Andereck, MD, FACP, is the Senior Scholar and Medical Director of Sutter Health’s Program in Medicine and Human Values. He has also chaired his hospital’s Ethics Committee since its inception in 1985.
Dr. Andereck was introduced to medical ethics in medical school by Drs. Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma, and later completed a National Endowment of Humanities fellowship with Dr. John Lachs, his former philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University. He first met his co-director of the Program in Medicine and Human Values, Albert Jonsen, PhD, in 1973, and studied with him in the early eighties while Dr. Jonsen was Chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of California.
As Director of the Program in Medicine and Human Values, Dr. Andereck oversees a vibrant and rapidly growing center, which provides ethics consultation, educational programs and policy development services for a multi-hospital network spread throughout the Bay Area, from a tertiary care hospital in San Francisco to a small, rural hospital in Lake County, 200 miles to the north.
Dr. Andereck lectures widely on ethical and economic issues. He has published in both the medical literature and the lay press and is frequently called on as a commentator by the media. Since 1985, Dr. Andereck has published and edited Hotline, a newsletter for physicians dealing with managed care contracting. He also edits “Ethical Times,” the quarterly journal of the Program in Medicine and Human Values with his colleague, Albert Jonsen, PhD., and is a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. In 2007, he was honored by the Board of Trustees of the California Pacific Medical Center Foundation for his outstanding commitment to helping the Center meet its projected goals of delivering excellent standards of patient care, research and education.