How a Pittsburgh doctor became a medical consultant for ‘The Pitt’

From the age of seven, Sylvia Owusu-Ansah knew she wanted to be a doctor. She didn’t, however, expect to be a medical consultant on a hit HBO Max show.

Today, Owusu-Ansah works as an associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She has also been an assistant medical director for the Secret Service and was one of the first healthcare workers in Pennsylvania to get the Covid-19 vaccine in December 2020.

In early 2024, she received the opportunity to be a consultant for The Pitt, a medical drama that has been praised as one of the most accurate television depictions of what it’s like to work in medicine. It’s also broken records, with Season 2 averaging more than 15 million viewers per episode.

So, how did it all begin?

Owusu-Ansah credits her friend Beth Hoffman, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, for connecting her to the show.

Hoffman works with an organization called Hollywood, Health & Society, which writers and producers use to find medical expertise for shows in development. The society reached out to Hoffman, asking for a Pittsburgh-based ER physician specializing in healthcare disparities, and Hoffman referred them to Owusu-Ansah.

Her work began before the show was even greenlit, on a two-hour Zoom call with some of the writers.

“The main question that they asked was…[what are] healthcare issues that you think need to be addressed that have not been addressed yet in a medical drama series?” Owusu-Ansah told Healthcare Brew.

She shared stories about her frustration with the way sickle cell patients are portrayed, the importance of Black patients having a doctor who looks like them, and her hospital’s tradition of holding a moment of silence when a child passes away. All of these ended up as plotlines in The Pitt.

In Season 1 Episode 2, a Black woman is brought into the ER on a stretcher, screaming in pain. While EMTs classify her as a “drug-seeking woman” who was causing a disturbance on a public bus, Dr. Samira Mohan, played by Supriya Ganesh, recognizes she’s exhibiting signs of sickle cell pain.

“That was my exact patient, except they changed the age,” Owusu-Ansah said.

In Season 1 Episode 6, a patient’s mother expresses joy in having Dr. Heather Collins, a Black woman, portrayed by Tracy Ifeachor, as her son’s doctor, calling her a “Black queen,” something Owusu-Ansah said she heard verbatim from a patient’s father.

And in the very first episode of The Pitt, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the show’s main character portrayed by Noah Wiley, introduces the hospital’s practice of holding a moment of silence when a patient passes, something that happens repeatedly over the course of the season.

The Pitt actually isn’t Owusu-Ansah’s first foray into the world of film and television, either. In 2022, she began developing a short film, In Good Hands, based on her forthcoming memoir of the same title, which explores her work-life balance as a Black physician.

The movie, which she jokingly calls “The Pitt before The Pitt,” was co-written with screenwriter Yasmine Crawley and filmed in 2022. It became a finalist at the HBO Short Film Showcase during the American Black Film Festival in 2025, Owusu-Ansah said.

Hollywood bound

In May 2024, Owusu-Ansah traveled to Los Angeles for a work-related conference, and decided to take time while there to thank Hollywood, Health & Society for connecting her with the producers of The Pitt. To her surprise, the organization took her to the writer’s room, where she met Wiley.

“Then it all hit at once, like, ‘Oh, this is a big deal,’” Owusu-Ansah said.

The writers invited her to tell them more about her life and experiences as an emergency physician. She told them they couldn’t make a show about emergency medicine in Pittsburgh without mentioning Freedom House Ambulance, formed by Black men in the 1960s as the first EMT program in the US. That became a storyline in Season 1 Episode 8, when a patient, Willie Alexander, portrayed by Harold Sylvester, tells the doctors about his experience as a paramedic with Freedom House.

The increased awareness of Freedom House Ambulance that came from that episode meant a lot to Owusu-Ansah, she said, as she’s working to get the group a Congressional Gold Medal, an effort that’s now a bill, introduced to Congress in February 2026.

What the future holds

Last December, Owusu-Ansah planned to travel with Hoffman back to LA to see the set for The Pitt on the Warner Bros. lot. However, a breast cancer diagnosis made her too ill to make the trip.

While the cancer may have kept her from the set and her day job as a doctor, it has not kept her from continuing her work in health media. Owusu-Ansah has been vlogging every step of her treatment, from chemo to surgery to radiation, and posting it on her Instagram account to educate others on the reality of the disease and treatment.

In the future, Owusu-Ansah hopes to continue delving deeper into health media.

“Now more than ever, people look to social media influencer doctors more than the popular healthcare institutions,” she said. “To have…healthcare issues and stories be portrayed accurately can positively change what happens in society.”