Michael DeVita, MD, FCCM

Michael DeVita, MD, FCCM

Michael DeVita, MD, FCCM

Dr. DeVita has been practicing, innovating, and researching in the arena of Critical Care Medicine since 1986 when he completed his training at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in New York. He was faculty at the University of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2009 during which he became a clinical and quality improvement leader. Under his leadership, the Ethics Committee created the first policy in the US for organ Donation following Cardiac Death Declaration (DCDD) using traditional circulatory-respiratory criteria. The committee also authored the nation’s first policy for research involving deceased individuals, a previously unregulated practice.
As the Chair of the hospital’s “code” committee, he led the group to create the first Rapid Response System in the western hemisphere. This system, created to find suddenly critically ill patients outside the ICU and provide them a preplanned, organized critical care response. This system enables the hospital to “build an ICU” in 90 seconds around any deteriorating patient. It reduced in-hospital cardiac arrests by two third, over 200 events per year, and is now standard practice in the US and is spreading around the world. He and his group have published the methodology and results of this effort extensively. He, along with Rinaldo Bellomo and Kenneth Hillman founded the Annual International Meeting on Rapid Response Systems, now in its 9th year.
Dr. DeVita was awarded the Society for Critical Care Medicine’s Christer Grenvik Award for contribution to Critical Care ethics after leading that group to create recommendations for DCDD. In 2011, the SCCM selected him for the Asmund Laerdal Award for contribution to resuscitation research. A Fellow of the American College of Critical Care Medicine, Dr. DeVita is active in the Society, and is a frequent speaker internationally on rapid response systems, organ donation, and end of life care in the ICU. He practices critical care at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, CT.