David
Werdegar

The Doctor Who Stayed

In San Francisco's Richmond District, on a stretch of Geary Boulevard where the fog rolls in hard every evening, there is a building that answers calls at 3 in the morning. Eight languages. Every night. No exceptions. That 24/7 warmline - the Friendship Line - is one of the things David Werdegar helped build. Most executives would put it on a press release and move on. He treated it as infrastructure.

Werdegar trained as an internist in an era when medicine still meant house calls and physician autonomy was unquestioned. He earned his MD at New York Medical College in 1956, completed his internship at UCSF a year later, and finished his Internal Medicine residency at UCSF in 1961. He added an MPH - Master of Public Health - because internal medicine alone felt too small for the problems he was watching pile up in San Francisco's aging population.

His career arc runs contrary to the typical physician-turned-executive story, where the closer you get to a corner office, the further you drift from the work. Werdegar moved closer. When he became President and CEO of Institute on Aging, he didn't become a fundraiser who happened to have a medical degree. He remained, at his core, a physician trying to solve a systems problem - how do you keep an aging person living in their own home, with dignity, without bankrupting their family, when every incentive in American healthcare points toward institutionalization?

Under Werdegar's leadership, IOA grew from a community program spun out of Mount Zion Hospital into one of the most comprehensive elder-care organizations in Northern California. The organization now serves residents across San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, running programs that span home care, dementia day enrichment, elder abuse prevention, PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly), and case management.

The research thread never broke, either. Even while running a near-$100-million nonprofit, Werdegar accumulated 27 peer-reviewed citations on PubMed - covering drug abuse treatment outcomes and HIV education and prevention in California. That's unusual. Most CEOs of organizations this size don't publish. Werdegar did, because the evidence mattered to how he designed programs.

In April 2011, he opened IOA's flagship campus - 50,000 square feet on Geary Boulevard, bringing scattered programs under one roof alongside senior housing. More than 500 people attended the dedication. The space included the Bernard and Barbro Osher Senior Fitness and Rehabilitation Center, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Auditorium, and the Ruth Ann Rosenberg Adult Day Health Center - named for the philanthropists from San Francisco's Jewish community who made it possible. Later that same year, Werdegar took the stage at the Commonwealth Club of California to address how America was - and was not - prepared for its aging population. He called his talk "Threescore and Ten: Changing Views of Aging."

He retired in January 2022, succeeded by J. Thomas Briody, MHSc. IOA continued operating at scale - a $93 million organization with 900 staff - which is the most honest assessment of a leadership legacy: what survives after you leave.