Section Chief, Pulmonary Critical Care, & Sleep Medicine, Associate Chief of Medicine, Director of Medical ICU
NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue

A Driving Force for Safety

Dr. Amit Uppal is hailed by colleagues as a driving force for quality and safety whose leadership at Bellevue has helped revolutionize care — from boosting outcomes in sepsis patients to deployment of a Threatened Airway Protocol and “airway boxes” that are now in use hospital-wide.

He has had “dramatic experiences” at Bellevue, sheltering and evacuating patients during Hurricane Sandy and caring for an Ebola Virus patient. But his “proudest accomplishments,” Dr. Uppal says, have come from working on a team “that made substantial and fundamental changes to the way we deliver care. Our efforts with regard to sepsis and airway safety impact patients on a large scale and in a sustained way.”

Coming from a family of doctors, Dr. Uppal always knew medicine was his calling, and he finds working in the city’s public health system “incredibly rewarding.”

“Delivering high-quality, cutting-edge care to all members of our society gets right to the core of why I became a physician,” he says. “There are very human moments when you connect with patients, there are cognitive challenges that change the way you think, and there are physical demands that push you to improve.”

Dr. Uppal earned his B.S. at John Carroll University and his M.D. at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health. He completed his Internal Medicine internship and residency at University of California, Irvine; a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at NYU, and a Master’s in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University, Netherlands.

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