Joe Sachs is an emergency physician, Emmy Award-winning television writer, and Executive Producer of the HBO Max series, The Pitt.

He began his interdisciplinary career as a student at Stanford Medical School, where he simultaneously pursued a master’s degree in Filmmaking. After graduation, he completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at UCLA. His television career began in 1994 with the NBC television series ER. He remained with the program throughout its fifteen-year run, eventually serving as Executive Producer and writing a total of thirty-five episodes of the acclaimed series.

In 2023, he joined HBO Max’s The Pitt, and has written multiple episodes during the show's first two seasons. His 2025 episode “2:00 P.M.” won the Humanitas Prize for best drama teleplay exploring the human condition in a nuanced, meaningful way. He is also the recipient of awards from the Writers Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America for his work on season one of The Pitt. In 2026, he was named to the Time100 list as one of the world’s most influential people in health.

Throughout his career as a television writer, Dr. Sachs has maintained a part-time practice in Emergency Medicine at a designated trauma center for Los Angeles County, even attending to the most critical patients during the peak of the COVID- 19 pandemic. While writing compelling drama always comes first, his commitment to state-of-the-art medical accuracy has created a positive impact on both professional and public health education all around the world.