Complete Story
04/06/2022
Richard Levitan, MD
Lab Chair - Airway Lab
Dr. Levitan was in the first class of Emergency Medicine residents at Bellevue Hospital in NYC (1990-1994). Frustrated with his training and skills in emergency airway management, he began a twenty-five year obsession with airway imaging, research, and education. He worked at inner city level 1 trauma centers in NYC (Bellevue, Lincoln Hospitals) and Philadelphia (Penn, Einstein, Jefferson) for twenty-three years before switching to working in rural hospitals in the mountains of New Hampshire and Colorado. He regularly teaches airway procedure courses about the US and around the world, and is perhaps best known for his monthly Baltimore cadaver course, which ran for twenty years from 2000-2020.
He has also taught cadaveric airway courses in Australia for ten years. In 1994 he invented a head-mounted camera system for imaging laryngoscopy called the Airway Cam. He used this device to perform research on laryngoscopy techniques, capturing laryngeal view from the operator’s perspective. He has approximately twenty other patents on surgical airway devices and tube introducers, and has done design consultation for many supraglottic airways and video laryngoscopes. Dr. Levitan has promoted and pioneered many airway techniques now in common practice including: epiglottoscopy, bimanual laryngoscopy, ear-to-sternal notch positioning, and nasal oxygenation during efforts securing a tube (NO DESAT). He volunteered in NYC during the Covid surge in April 2020, and subsequently wrote numerous articles on Covid addressing “Silent Hypoxia” and the role of pulse oximetry monitoring; these received worldwide attention in popular media. Dr. Levitan was commissioned as a Commander in the US Navy Medical Corps in January of 2021.
