ICU panoramic photo

Neil Halpern, MD graduated from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, in 1977. He then completed postgraduate training in Internal Medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center and in Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is board certified in internal medicine and critical care medicine.

Since 1999, Dr. Halpern has been Attending Physician in Critical Care Medicine, Chief of the Critical Care Medicine Service and Medical Director of Respiratory Therapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In February 2017, Dr. Halpern was named the inaugural director of the new Critical Care Center. He chaired the multidisciplinary ICU Design Committee that developed the plan and monitored the construction of Memorial’s new 20-bed medical-surgical adult ICU that opened in April 2007. This ICU was the winner of the 2009 ICU Design Citation, an award co-sponsored by the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) Healthcare Division and the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN). Dr. Halpern has reinvigorated the delivery of CCM services at Memorial. He has helped expand the CCM fellowship program, developed a very large and highly skilled advanced practitioner team that delivers care within the ICU and serves as CCM consultants and as the campus-wide Rapid Response Team and has significantly enhanced the CCM research program. Additionally, he has implemented advanced informatics technologies within the ICU and across the inpatient campus.

Prior to coming to Memorial, Dr. Halpern was the director of the surgical ICU and then facility-wide critical care director at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Bronx, NY. In those capacities, he directed the renovation of an 8-bed Surgical ICU in 1995 and the design of a 20-bed medical-surgical adult ICU in 1998-1999. Additionally, he reorganized the delivery of all CCM services at the VA overseeing 3 ICUs (medical, surgical and coronary), emergency room, perioperative services, and interventional radiology. Dr. Halpern managed two STAT laboratories and was responsible for POCT in critical care and the operating room as well as autologous transfusion services in the operating rooms using cell savers.