UPMC Passavant president still finds time for patients
Since she was a teenager, Dr. Elizabeth Piccione understood the value of cardiology.
“I love practicing cardiology,” Piccione said. “Somebody can be so terribly sick, somebody can be close to death and you can fix them and they walk out of the hospital two days later to be with their family for the next 30 years. It’s an incredibly rewarding profession because there’s a lot of treatments that we can do to help people and there’s a lot of things we can do to help people from ever needing us.”
Piccione has served New Castle and the wider Pittsburgh area as a cardiologist since 2003, shortly after she went through her fellowship training at Allegheny General Hospital.
Today, she finds time to continue to practice cardiology wherever she can. However, most of her time is consumed by her duties as president of the two UPMC Passavant hospitals at McCandless and Cranberry, a position she’s held since September 2024.
Piccione said the initial push for her to enter medicine — cardiology in particular — came shortly after she entered college at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in upstate New York.
“When I was 19 years old, unfortunately, my father developed some heart issues,” Piccione said. “It affected not only my father, but also a lot of his brothers and sisters and my aunts and uncles and my grandparents. We have a very, very strong family history of pretty bad heart disease and so I had seen what this disease can do to people, both women and men.”
Shortly thereafter, Piccione found a job at the school’s student health service, where she learned the ins and outs of patient care. It was here, she said, where she found her true calling.
“I always had an interest in science and math and I initially thought I was going to go the route of engineering,” Piccione said. “That job really showed me I like interacting with people. I wanted to help people when they needed it and so I decided that I would go to medical school.”
Piccione first gained the title of president in September 2021, when she was named the interim president of both UPMC Jameson in New Castle and the two UPMC Horizon hospitals in Mercer County. She had previously served as vice president of medical affairs for all three hospitals.
“In 2021, for a lot of reasons, there was a leadership vacuum at the hospital and I was asked to be president of the hospital,” Piccione said.
While it was only meant to be an interim position, Piccione ended up holding the role of president at the three hospitals until September 2024, when she received an unexpected call.
“My boss called me and said, ‘You know, Beth, you're a very strategic person and I think it’s really important that we have someone like you at Passavant Hospital,’” Piccione said. “He said, ‘There’s a lot of different things going on and I really need your help and assistance at Passavant.’”
Although she has served as the president of the UPMC Passavant hospitals for a year and a half, her executive position hasn’t prevented her from continuing to actively practice as a cardiologist on certain days of the week. She works with physician assistants at Passavant’s Heart and Vascular Institute.
According to UPMC spokesperson Karen Beardsley, Piccione is one of only two UPMC hospital presidents who is also a practicing physician. The other is Dr. Richard Beigi, president of Magee-Womens Hospital and a board-certified OB-GYN.
One reason that Dr. Piccione continues to juggle her cardiology practice with her duties as president of UPMC Passavant is because of what she describes as a general shortage of cardiologists to meet the demand.
“There aren't enough heart doctors for all the people who need them,” Piccione said. “Heart disease kills more men and more women than every form of cancer combined. If you think about a disease that has a negative effect on that many people, you can see why cardiologists are in such demand.”
Piccione says it was important for her to maintain her practice for the sake of her current patients, many of whom have seen her for decades.
“Even though I am a hospital president, I still was seeing patients,” Piccione said. “If you’ve had a doctor for 20 years and all of a sudden she’s going to leave and go somewhere else, that can cause a little bit of distress in your patients.”
However, she also said that, while it is unusual in the UPMC system, hospitals can benefit from having physicians involved on the executive side.
“I think it’s really important that clinical people be involved in the business side of medicine,” Piccione said. “I did not have a lot of business training (in 2021). I did not really have a lot of administrative training. However, I knew how to take care of sick people. I knew a lot about how hospitals work, how insurance companies work and the issues that patients deal with every single day.”
