Dr. Pilar Ortega (NHMA)
Dr. Pilar Ortega is a board-certified Emergency Physician and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Departments of Emergency Medicine and Medical Education, where she directs the Medical Spanish program. Dr. Ortega is Co-founder and Chair for the Chicago Medical Organization for Latino Advancement (MOLA), a non-profit professional association whose goal is to increase the number of Hispanic and bilingual physicians and to improve the health of Hispanics in the U.S. She is the author of Spanish and the Medical Interview (2nd Ed., 2015), a textbook for providers to learn to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients. Most recently, Dr. Ortega has been leading the U.S. National Medical Spanish Taskforce—a group of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional leaders who are developing an evidence-based process for Medical Spanish standardization and language concordance research in medical settings.
She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and her MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where she also completed residency training. Dr. Ortega’s clinical and academic areas of interest are Medical Spanish education for physicians and linguistically-competent healthcare access for Hispanic/Latino patients. She locally, nationally, and internationally recognized for her contributions on the topics of language barriers in health and Medical Spanish education. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their four children.