Felipe Urdaneta, MD

Dr. Urdaneta is an academic anesthesiologist at both UF Health and the Gainesville VA Medical center. Although he works with both patients and residents; he spends the majority of his time in the cardiothoracic arena with adult patients and some pediatric cardiac cases. His emphasis is dealing with perioperative echocardiography.

In 2006, he was hired to open up the Perioperative Echocardiography service at North Florida Regional Medical Center here in Gainesville and he left academics for private practice. Working there helped him realize his passion to teach and how he wants to spend the rest of his professional career in education and teaching about difficult airway management.

Since 2007, Dr. Urdaneta has been at the VA and in charge of the UF Airway Rotation. He is the Chair of the Local VA Out of the Operating Room Airway Management (OOORAM) initiative and deals with both simulation and hands-on OR training of Non-Anesthesia providers in airway management and he has trained over 200 VA employees in this area.

Dr. Urdaneta is the co-founder of the Board of the Gainesville VA Simulation Center. He is also a member of the Department of Anesthesiology Didactics Committee and the Anesthesiology Admissions Committee. In the VA, he is the representative of the Emergency Effectiveness Committee and he’s in charge of CRNA recruitment.