He'd also raised concerns about the UPMC CEO's ties to a device company
A cardiologist who led a major UPMC institute says he was fired after reporting racist texts and a CEO's conflict of interest.
Dr. Hemal Gada spent nearly a decade working for what eventually became part of the UPMC system, starting at PinnacleHealth Hospitals in October 2015 as an interventional cardiologist specializing in structural heart interventions. After PinnacleHealth merged with UPMC in 2017, he rose to President of the UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute in Central Pennsylvania in June 2020. By August 13, 2025, he was out of a job — terminated, he says, because he refused to stay quiet.
In a lawsuit filed on March 31, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (Gada v. UPMC et al., Case No. 2:26-cv-00524-JFC), Dr. Gada alleges that his termination came in direct retaliation for two things: raising concerns about racist text messages exchanged by fellow physicians and reporting a potential conflict of interest involving the CEO of the entire UPMC system.
The sequence of events, as laid out in court filings, is worth noting for anyone in HR.
In mid-April 2025, a vice president told Dr. Gada he had filed an HR complaint about text messages sent by two physicians, Drs. William Bachinsky and Randy Hubbard. The messages allegedly included remarks that patients do not like to be treated by brown physicians with accents and wished luck with the effort to replace white...
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