Eric A. Wechsler, MD, FNKF

Dr. Eric Wechsler has been elected twice by his peers to chair the Division of Nephrology at Hoag Hospital Newport Beach. He founded Southern California Kidney Associates in 2008 and has practiced in Orange County for more than twenty years.

He built PreserveHealth because the medicine he wanted to practice — unhurried, proactive, genuinely accessible — had stopped being possible inside a fifteen-minute visit.

That instinct isn't new. In medical school in Miami, he spent his free hours in inner-city clinics and graduated with the Alpha Omega Alpha award for the best doctor-patient relationship in his class. Years later, watching patients leave nutrition appointments demoralized — told what they could never eat again — he built an iPhone app to give them their diets back. The through-line is the same: medicine works better when the physician has time to actually explain it.

He has also done this at scale. As founder and CEO of Nephrology Specialists IPA, he built and still leads a care management program that has covered more than 4,000 patients across Southern California under value-based contracts. Under his leadership, planned dialysis starts rose from 11% to over 60%, home dialysis more than doubled, and time to transplant listing fell by more than a year — because his team stopped waiting for the system's timeline and started the work early.

None of that required new medicine. It required someone paying attention before there was a problem. That is the entire idea behind PreserveHealth — the same attention, for far fewer people.

His view of chronic disease is preventive and aggressive. Kidney disease, heart disease, and metabolic disease are one problem wearing three names, and caught early enough, most of it is modifiable. That belief is the entire premise of this practice.