Ever since it debuted in 2025, the HBO Max medical drama “The Pitt” has garnered acclaim not just from TV critics but from doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Each season of the show chronicles a day in the emergency department of a fictional hospital in Pittsburgh, and the show just finished its second season this month.

On this episode of HealthChangers, host Ashley Bach speaks with Dr. Daniel Meltzer and Dr. Mike Woodruff. Besides their roles as executive medical directors at Regence, they’re are also board-certified emergency medicine physicians. Both have worked many years in settings similar to “The Pitt.”

We discuss what they think about the show and how it feels to watch their unique profession portrayed on TV. This is the first of a two-part conversation with Dr. Meltzer and Dr. Woodruff; we’ll will publish the second part next month.

Listen to the full podcast episode on the player above. Below are some highlights, which have been edited for length and clarity. 

AB: I wanted to start off by asking, what do you think “The Pitt” gets right about working in an emergency department?

DM: I think it gets a lot right. Viscerally you can see the intensity, the kind of frenetic pace, the never-ending onslaught of humanity that continues to walk through the doors. You can see the multitasking that transpires of all the staff. You can see the diversity of pathology. You can see teamwork. You know, there’s both a hierarchy and a flat hierarchy—that is to say, there is a hierarchy of physicians and nurses, but there’s also everyone working together. I think you see a real intersection of the personal and the professional, that while people are doing work that requires great skill and training, it’s deeply affecting personally, given the intensity. I think you can see that it’s crude on some level, and it’s real.

MW: I’ll underline the teamwork; the team is everything in the emergency department. These are quirky, flawed, brilliant humans who are giving their all to solve these incredibly complex and challenging and time-pressured problems, caring for people in their moment of most dire need, and you can really see how these people are just devoted to their work in this really deep way. And I think it honestly does justice to the amazing role that these people play in our society.

I’d also say it gets the waiting room almost right. Part of the reason we do all the work we do at Regence educating people about where to go besides the emergency department if you don’t need to is because the waiting room is an experience unto itself. And while it’s probably not as dramatic as what’s portrayed on “The Pitt” all the time, you are going to wait, often. And if you’re there for a reason that could be better cared for by your primary care doctor, or maybe a telehealth visit or an urgent care visit, man, that’s going to be a much better experience for you.

AB: How does the show compare to similar shows like “ER” [which ran on NBC from 1994 to 2009 and shares the same producers and star Noah Wyle with “The Pitt”]?

DM: “ER” came on when I was a second-year medical student, and it was a highly impactful show in my career and in my life. Noah Wyle was a medical student [on “ER”]. [Dr. Woodruff] and I were medical students at the same time. And I think what it really did is highlight emergency medicine as both a specialty and a convening point for what happens in the hospital, because you see the intersection not just of emergency physicians, but of surgeons and internists and cardiologists and other specialists working together. And you know, it was so impactful that it impacted not only my choice of specialty, but actually the name of my son, whose name is Noah, who, in part, is actually named after Noah Wyle.

AB: The work you have done as doctors in ERs is very rewarding work, but also very challenging. How has it been personally to watch it on screen?

MW: My wife calls it my therapy show, and I probably end up in tears at least once an episode, maybe twice or three times even. It’s so accurate that it just brings back, for me, a lot of raw emotion around the heartbreaks that I’ve been a participant in, in the emergency department. People who have passed in the emergency department, people who’ve been saved, who kind of come back to this world, people who are healed and can live a better life because of our interventions.

There’s one episode in Season 1 where a young girl comes in, a drowning victim, and she doesn’t make it, and that was very therapeutic for me. I had a similar drowning victim in my practice who also did not make it. And I carried that for many, many years. I still carry it, but I carried it in a very heavy way, and I needed therapy for that. I went and got therapy.

And for me, one of the most important points that [“The Pitt”] can show us is that the people who work in environments like this need therapy, and they need help managing the burden of what they do every day. So in a way, it’s destigmatizing the idea that these are traumatic roles that these heroes play, and that they don’t walk away from it unscathed, and so they need help, and they need support, and they need help healing themselves. So for me, the experience of watching [the show] is absolutely amazing and has been very therapeutic.

DM: It’s hard to answer your question in terms of how it’s been [to watch the show]. It’s not entertainment; it’s very personal. We spend probably more time in our lives in the emergency department than anywhere other than our beds – between medical school and residency and professionally. It’s a huge part of our life. It can be very gratifying work, but it is exhausting, emotionally, physically, intellectually, psychologically. And I think you see some of that [on the show]. For many, if not most people, it’s work that’s taken for granted. There’s just an assumption that someone will be there, that the quality of care that’s delivered will be very high, and that you’ll walk out, hopefully, number one, and number two, feeling better than when you walked in. But that comes at a cost, and some of that is personal.

AB: The professionals working in the emergency room on “The Pitt” face many social issues as they treat patients. Just a sampling from Season 1: elder neglect, teen pregnancy, drug overdose, fentanyl crisis, dementia, human trafficking, homelessness and gun violence. Is this unique to emergency departments?

DM: I don’t think it’s unique to emergency departments. I also don’t think it’s unique to other areas of practice. As Regence’s chief medical officer, Dr. Donna Milavetz, or our executive medical director of behavioral health, Dr. Mike Franz, would both say, the issues are all interconnected and interrelated and interdependent. When we talk about whole-person health, you can’t separate the physical or the behavioral. And I think what the show illustrates, and what emergency departments often most acutely illustrate is when the social issues, be it education, be it drug use, be it abuse, be it mental health issues, are not tended to, that the physical follows very often or the behavioral will become primary, and [the issues] become so catastrophic that they require, sometimes, hospitalization.

MW: I do think that the emergency department serves as a safety net, and I think we should specifically call that out. In a system that has a lot of holes in it, people fall through the cracks or can’t access [the system], well, the ED acts as a place where they can all ultimately come and get seen by somebody. Now they might have to wait eight hours, but the barrier to getting in is pretty low.

DM: In terms of site of care, albeit a safety net, [the emergency department] is absolutely not primed for efficiency, and it’s not primed for continuity. So [as a patient] who you see is going to vary, their bandwidth and attention and focus is going to vary, and the degree to which they’re going to be able to ensure continuity of care is definitely going to vary. And so it’s in our best interest, and not only as a health plan but as a society, to help manage these issues up front as best as we can.