The man hired to unify the West Penn Allegheny Health System and help it compete more effectively with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a 45-year-old Camden, N.J., hospital executive and practicing ophthalmologist who apparently does not suffer from a lack of confidence.

Chris Olivia

Dr. Christopher Olivia "is not shy," said Gary Carter, president of the New Jersey Hospital Association. "He has his opinions. He is not afraid to express his opinions." While "some people would consider that aggressive," such an approach will only help the executive succeed at the 12,000-person West Penn Allegheny, Mr. Carter said.

"In an academic medical center, you are not dealing with small egos. ... I think he can deal well with those kinds of competing and diverse personalities."

Currently chief executive officer of the nonprofit Cooper Health System in southern New Jersey, Dr. Olivia beat out a second candidate, Kenneth Hanover of The Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati, for the top job at the region's second-largest health system. A third candidate from Texas removed himself from consideration, according to sources familiar with the situation.

West Penn Allegheny has been without a permanent CEO since the abrupt departure in July of Jerry Fedele, who left amid internal disagreements about a systemwide consolidation. Board member Keith Smith has been running the 12,000-person network on an interim basis while the board looked nationally for a successor.

Dr. Olivia inherits a system that is still a distant second to the 44,000-person UPMC but is in the middle of a long-promised integration of its services and departments so it can compete more effectively with its more dominant rival -- it recently merged three separate boards into one, as one example.

Expected to begin his new post in March, Dr. Olivia brings to Pittsburgh a rare combination of qualifications for a health system CEO -- both a license to practice medicine and an MBA -- as well as a reputation as an up-and-coming executive within the industry. He was just 40 years old when appointed chief executive of Cooper in 2002. Prior ties to Pennsylvania include a bachelor's degree from Penn State University, a medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, according to a biography listed on Cooper's Web site.

"He is very smart," said Mr. Carter of the New Jersey Hospital Association, "and that is one of the reasons he has risen as fast as he has."

During the search process, opinions about Dr. Olivia varied within West Penn Allegheny, according to sources familiar with the process, with some admiring his intelligence and others expressing concern about a perceived overconfidence. Said one New Jersey hospital official: "Off the record, he is not humble."

But Highland Park health care attorney and former West Penn Allegheny in-house counsel Andy Thurman argued yesterday that doctors "are not trained to be humble. They are trained to be decisive .... That personality will not be an obstacle in dealing with other physicians. They are used to their peers not being humble. Where it may be a problem is with nonphysician members of the system. We will just have to see how he does."

Cooper is the largest private employer in Camden, N.J., with more than 4,000 employees, and acts as the core campus for the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. It attracted national attention last year for treating New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine after a near-fatal highway accident.

Camden is one of the poorer cities in America, frequently landing on "most dangerous" lists, but during Dr. Olivia's tenure Cooper's revenues more than doubled, its federal grants increased by 16-fold, and the institution grabbed the No. 1 ranking in market share for hospitals in southern New Jersey, according to a news release yesterday from West Penn Allegheny. After joining the organization in 2000, Dr. Olivia merged a multispecialty University Physicians group into the larger system. He also won higher reimbursement rates for Cooper while tightening expenses, according to Mr. Carter.

"Very results oriented," said Tony Evans, Camden's director of health and human services.

Profits at Cooper were $14.3 million in the 2002 tax year, $23.8 million in the 2003 tax year and $20 million in the 2004 tax year -- the three most recent years available via an online database. West Penn Allegheny -- the result of a 2000 merger of Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side and The Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Bloomfield -- earned $6.1 million in fiscal 2007, (its fourth consecutive year of profits) but that was down 71 percent from the year before.

In his online biography, Dr. Olivia also takes credit for leading the turnaround of Mercy Health Partners in Springfield, Ohio, where he was senior vice president and chief medical officer. Mercy, his biography claims, "became solidly profitable by the time of his departure" in 2000. He also was a practicing ophthalmologist in western New York, both in private practice and at the Health Care Plan in Buffalo.

In a release yesterday, Dr. Olivia called the new job an "exciting opportunity to work with West Penn Allegheny's board to lead the system into the future." He pledged a commitment to "the development of an organizational culture that emphasizes clinical leadership and unity in our endeavors."