Dr. Rendell W. Ashton

Expert Publications

• Worldwide disaster medical response: an historical perspective.
• Engendering enthusiasm for sustainable disaster critical care response: why this is of consequence to critical care professionals?
• Mounier-Kuhn syndrome: overcoming a lack of recognition.
• Smoking-associated interstitial lung diseases.
• A 38-year-old welder with dyspnea and iron overload.
• Fever and dyspnea in a 61-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer.
• Airway pressure release ventilation: an alternative mode of mechanical ventilation in acute respiratory distress syndrome.
• Recurrent pneumonia in a 51-year-old woman due to congenital bronchoesophageal fistula.
• Inhaled therapy for acute COPD exacerbation in the hospital: are we missing the low-hanging fruit?
• Mucoid plugs in eosinophilic pneumonia.
• State of the evidence: mechanical ventilation with PEEP in patients with cardiogenic shock.
• Changes to practice may help avoid 'double trouble'.
• Pirfenidone and Nintedanib for Treatment of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.

Media Releases

Get to know Pulmonologist & Critical Care Medicine Specialist Dr. Rendell W. Ashton, who serves patients in Cleveland, Ohio.

Dr. Ashton has been a pulmonary and critical care medicine physician in the Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic Main Campus since July of 2008. 

His clinical and scholarly interests include many areas of critical care and pulmonary medicine, but particularly respiratory failure, mechanical ventilation, and sepsis. He is also interested in educational scholarship, including medical simulation as a learning tool.

Cleveland Clinic was at the forefront of modern medicine when it was first organized as a multi-specialty group practice in 1921. From a small outpatient clinic, it has grown to become the world’s first integrated international health system. With more than 65,000 caregivers worldwide, Cleveland Clinic has almost 6 million patient visits per year, at more than 200 locations.

Educated in the United States, Dr. Ashton completed his undergraduate education at Brigham Young University in 1994. He received his medical degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He then pursued residency and chief residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. He came to Cleveland after three years in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

With an unwavering commitment to his specialty, the doctor is board-certified in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM). The ABIM is a physician-led, non-profit, independent evaluation organization driven by doctors who want to achieve higher standards for better care in a rapidly changing world.

Among his other roles, Dr. Ashton has directed the pulmonary/critical care medicine fellowship at Cleveland Clinic since 2010 and helped launch the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship in 2010, which he directed until July of 2013. He was also the president of the Association of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Program Directors in 2017-18.

Pulmonology is a medical specialty that deals with diseases involving the respiratory tract. A pulmonologist is an internal medicine physician who specializes in preventing, diagnosing, and treating conditions and diseases that affect the lungs, bronchial tubes, and the respiratory system, including the nose, pharynx, and throat.

Intensive care medicine, also called critical care medicine, is a medical specialty that deals with seriously or critically ill patients who have, are at risk of, or are recovering from conditions that may be life-threatening. Critical care medicine specialists (also called intensivists) are medical doctors who specialize in the care of people who are in an intensive care unit (ICU). In some areas, when a person is very ill and has to spend time in an ICU, he or she is cared for by a critical care medicine specialist.

An authority in his field, Dr. Ashton has been the recipient of the Teacher of the Year Award by the Department of Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University (2005,2006, 2007, 2008), and Teacher of the Year Award by the Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic (2008, 2009, 2010).

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