Richard Mark Levitan, MD is an American emergency medicine physician and businessperson. He is a clinical professor of medicine at Dartmouth College and a practicing physician at the Littleton Regional Hospital. He also runs a company that creates materials and runs events to teach emergency airway management.

In April 2020, Levitan volunteered for 10 days to help treat patients with COVID-19 at the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital in New York City.  He observed many patients with pneumonia and hypoxia (low oxygen levels in blood) who did not have typical symptoms of breathing problems such as chest discomfort or painful breathing. Levitan suggested in a New York Times op-ed that the widespread use of pulse oximeters could lead to earlier detection of serious breathing complications, and to better outcomes for patients with these complications.  Although the op-ed was covered in the news, other doctors cautioned that early detection might lead to overtreatment, and that the role of early detection of hypoxia in treating COVID-19 still needed to be studied. Levitan’s hypothesis was supported by a prospective study appearing some months later in Academic Emergency Medicine, for which Levitan was invited to write an accompanying piece of commentary.