Story By Linda Harris

Wheeling Hospital's board of directors has renewed its management contract with Pittsburgh-based R&V Associates through July 2010.

In making the announcement, the board cited the hospital's "growing financial strength, as well as the overall enhancements of its medical services and patient care" as reasons for adding a full two years to R&V's current contract, which otherwise would have expired in 2008.

R&V, a management firm founded by Ronald Violi and Vincent Deluzio, specializes in crisis management, mergers and acquisitions, recapitalizations, turnarounds and restructurings for a wide range of industries, though its emphasis is the health care sector. The firm was retained in 2006 to restructure Wheeling Hospital, which for years had been plagued with red ink.

Violi currently serves as the hospital's chief executive officer, while Deluzio, an attorney, is active in legal and regulatory matters affecting it.

"I think red ink was certainly the driving crisis. They were at the end of the line -- out of money, out of everything," Violi said, pegging the red ink at "close to $60 million in the five or six years" before R&V was hired. "For the hospital itself, for a while, it was pretty dire."

The key to Wheeling Hospital's turnaround, he said, is the same as it has been in any other he's been involved in -- changing the mindset of people who work there. Violi said they did that by meeting with people, letting them know what they were planning and working with them to get it done.

"We can make a lot of suggestions, do a lot of things, but unless and until you get people on board, get them to understand and move forward (and) change the culture" it won't change the status quo, he said.

"That's really why we're where we're at here."

He said Wheeling Hospital reached the break-even point financially within about six months, "and we've been profitable over two years running now." Though this year's numbers haven't been audited, he figures the hospital will finish about $10 million in the black.

Violi isn't new to hospital turnarounds. He served in a similar capacity at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh from 1998-2004, steering it away from a financial crisis and returning it to profitability before launching R&V with Deluzio in 2005.

"It's what we do," he said. "But the thing that makes us different from other people is that we actually take responsibility for operations. We do not come in and clean house -- we don't fire everybody in sight, we don't cut advertising budgets or cut programs. In fact, since we've been here, we've added programs, we've added advertising dollars, we've added doctors. We've added a lot of things. That's the key."

All told, he said fewer than 60 positions were cut, most of them through early retirements. He said 2,200 to 2,400 people remain on the hospital staff, easily making it the largest employer in Ohio County and a force in the local economy.

Going forward, he said, the challenge is to "bring more sub-specialists in, cover more ground."

Ramping up specialties like pediatrics and obstetrics would accentuate the hospital's role as a driving force regionally in the health care sector, he noted.

"People shouldn't have to leave the community to get service," he added. "The end game is that we'd like to reach the point where we can provide" all of the health services community residents need.