9 min read This piece is part of our first-annual Health Care Heroes series, where we spotlight people doing amazing things in the health care and medical fields. Read the rest of the stories here . Justin Fiala, MD, is a pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine specialist at the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute who splits his time between the ICU and the rehabilitation hospital. But perhaps the work he finds most fulfilling is the free sleep clinic he launched in 2021 that “fills a really blaring gap in the health care system.” Below, in his own words, he shares how the program originated, what it entails, and why he believes sleep is a human right. I WAS IN the final year of my pulmonary critical care training as the pandemic kicked up. We would see whole families admitted to the ICU at the same time and most of those families would be from historically marginalized groups. The disparities weighed really heavily on a lot of us. And there was so much loss with the pandemic.…