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Chuck Bogosta efforts at UPMC stretch far beyond Pittsburgh‘s borders
Pittsburgh Business Times | Feb. 12, 2024 | by Paul Gough

Chuck Bogosta of UPMC international, speaking at an event in Croatia where UPMC is building a cancer center.
Photo: Rikard Jadan
When Chuck Bogosta graduated from the State University of New York Oneonta in 1980, he didn’t expect to either move to Pittsburgh or get into health care.
Bogosta, who grew up in the Albany region, had gotten a bachelor’s degree in business economics at SUNY Oneonta and earned a master’s of education degree at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
“I had every intention of becoming a dean of students. That’s where my passion was,” recalled Bogosta, who this year will retire after more than a quarter century at UPMC as EVP and years running its international division and the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.
But in the early ‘80s, education was what Bogosta was doing, as an associate dean of students at Siena College, a small Catholic school, in the first four years of his career. That’s where he first got into the health care field, responsible for the student health center among many other duties. It wasn’t long before Bogosta found what would become his career. He started working for an investment banker that owned health care facilities in Texas, before helping to start three health care startups in the 1990s that he described as a “miserable failure, one that was so-so, and one that was a huge success.”
After the sale of the successful company in the mid-1990s, Bogosta was heading back to Albany from Manhattan and talking to Steve Boochever and John D’Andrea, who were outside counsel not only for the company he had just been sold but also the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Boochever asked Bogosta what he was going to do next.
“He asked, would you ever go to Pittsburgh,” Bogosta said. The thought hadn’t occurred, but Bogosta found himself in Pittsburgh the next Tuesday, meeting with UPMC’s Jeff Romoff and John Paul. Bogosta went in wanting to remain in an entrepreneurial setting, uninterested in working at a large bureaucracy. Romoff and Paul convinced him otherwise.
“I’m hooked,” Bogosta recalled. “And it was because they said to me, ‘Chuck, you’ve got all this entrepreneurial experience. You can be an entrepreneur in this organization, and you will have resources that are far beyond what you would ever imagine in a startup. And it’s panned out that way.”
Boosting UPMC’s cancer programs
Bogosta joined UPMC in October 1997 as COO of the University Services Organization — now known as PMC Community Medicine — and the Hillman Cancer Center. In those days, UPMC wasn’t the behemoth it has become. It was the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, with about $1.5 billion in revenue and less than 10,000 employees, without the statewide, beyond Pennsylvania’s borders and international reputation it has now.
Bogosta’s job at the time was recruiting physicians to build up UPMC. He was directly involved in recruiting many of the physician groups that have become high profile at UPMC, including the Maroon group, Burke and Bradley Orthopedics, and the Cinciola internal medicine practice. Another high-profile acquisition, of the practice of oncology pioneers Dr. Stanley Marks and the late Dr. Jeffrey Shogan, led to what Bogosta is most proud of in his career.
“It was together with Stan and Jeff and a fabulous team we started to build,” Bogosta said.
Those efforts built up UPMC’s high-level, deep impact cancer programs from a focus in and near western Pennsylvania to where it is today with the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-certified facility and 70 locations. Bogosta credited Marks with a big role in the leadership, as well as other physicians and executives.
“Stan Marks and I, we have been shoulder to shoulder every step of the way,” Bogosta said. “Sometimes we tell each other that we share each other’s brain.”
Going international
Beyond UPMC’s cancer programs, Bogosta has steered the course of the health system’s international programs, which include a network of hospitals in both Ireland and Italy, as well as cancer centers and hospital management in Croatia, China and elsewhere around the globe. But it began three decades ago, before Bogosta joined UPMC, with the ISMETT transplant hospital in Sicily.
Bogosta’s involvement began around 2005, when he was in an executive staff meeting when Romoff announced that the manager leading the international operations was leaving. Romoff asked if any of the 15 executives in the room had ever worked overseas. No one raised their hand.
Romoff then asked if anyone had ever lived overseas. Bogosta lived in Australia for four years in childhood while his dad worked for Bendix Corp.
“You’ve got the job,” Romoff told him.
Bogosta began to work on the international side, while at the same time leading UPMC International at same time serving as president of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, the latter position one he would hold from 2004 to 2021 when he handed over those reins to Beth Wild while remaining vice chair for administration.
What Bogosta and others built for UPMC on the international side was from scratch, and unlike anything another American academic medical center has done. UPMC International has steadily built itself and morphed over the years, first focusing on consulting internationally without building a lot of their own facilities nor acquiring others.
Italy and Ireland have become focal points where it has both built facilities, forged relationships with local governments and acquired hospitals and specialty clinics. It has a collaboration with Xiangya Hospital in China and signed a strategic cooperation agreement with China’s Wanda Group to manage hospitals in China, although that has been put on hold in recent years. UPMC International also is building a cancer center in Croatia.
The ISMETT transplant hospital in Sicily has been joined by a private hospital called UPMC Salvator Mundi International Hospital in 2018 and plans to expand ISMETT and a biomedical research and biotechnology center in Italy. UPMC also has Hillman Cancer programs in Italy and Ireland.
But it’s in Ireland where UPMC has built what looks more and more like its stateside operations: Acquiring UPMC Whitfield Hospital in 2018, UPMC Kildare Hospital in 2019 UPMC Aut Even Hospital and a sports medicine clinic in early 2023. That’s been part of the plan.
“The (UPMC) board had said to us that they wanted to replicate what we’ve done in western Pennsylvania and other parts of Pennsylvania, so we’re working on that in Ireland, building a clinical network,” Bogosta said.
The goals have been to greatly increase the return on investment for UPMC, bringing more money to the overall organization as well as providing the system’s medical expertise to a wider audience. The goals, Bogosta said, have always been to enhance Pittsburgh’s reputation, to bring higher margins than what would have been received in the United States with its limited investment, and then to be focused on where UPMC could do well.
“We had to really make a difference on the ground where we could go in and ensure that patients could obtain care that they otherwise couldn’t access,” Bogosta said.
He said that’s a slower process of development because of the care UPMC and UPMC International put into the investments that fit the model. He also credits UPMC International’s teams at learning a lot about the culture and adjusting and communicating well, no matter where they are in the world.
“I think that wherever we go, in oncology and internationally, we’ve made a difference in patients’ lives,” he said. “It’s made it easier for people overseas not to travel outside their country (to get care). In the United States, it’s made it easier for people to not leave their home areas (for UPMC Hillman care).”
The future
Bogosta said he’s leaving the organization in good hands, with Wild taking over fully at UPMC Hillman and Dr. Joel Nelson, chief clinical officer of UPMC International, becoming president of UPMC International. He’s going to stay working full-time at UPMC until the end of June and then remain as an adviser to CEO Leslie Davis for several months after that. He praised Davis’ leadership and her vision at what Bogosta said is a tough time in the field of health care.
UPMC is moving ahead with an expansion of the UPMC cancer center in Ireland and the development of its cancer center in Croatia — Bogosta, Wild and Nelson were there this week — but has paused any potential new projects internationally temporarily until the industry’s economic challenges begin to clear.
“We’re (focused on) growing existing operations and ensuring that they’re focusing very, very well overseas,” Bogosta said.
Bogosta is taking the advice he’s received from others and not committing to his next step yet. But one thing’s clear: He’s still planning to remain connected with UPMC, continuing to work on the Rush to Crush Cancer fundraising ride and mentoring young professionals. He said he’s been asked by several institutions to volunteer with alumni advisement. Bogosta received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, SUNY Oneonta, and in 2018 gave the commencement address.
“I went into student affairs (out of college) and so it’s kind of natural to go back into that and that has been without a doubt the most important thing I’ve done,” Bogosta said. “I love watching and following the careers of the people I have worked with.”
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