News : Mike Riege "Ambushed" by Vinton Unlimited

Mike Riege, Virginia Gay Hospital's Administrator of 29 years was ambushed by Vinton Unlimited on Wednesday afternoon. Riege is retiring at the end of this week, and was honored for his hard work and dedication to quality healthcare in Benton County. Riege is the administrator responsible for transforming Virginia Gay into an excellent healthcare institution focused on family medicine that serves the entire county. Mike’s contributions are too numerous to list in a short article like this. Just a few of them include raising millions of dollars to improve the facility and make state-of-the-art treatment and diagnostic equipment available. Van Horne, Urbana, and Atkins now have local clinics that were constructed during Mike’s tenure. He foresaw the need for a new clinic and had confidence that more health care providers could be recruited when it was completed. What was once called the “Annex” has become a long-term care unit of exceptional quality. Perhaps the most far-reaching of Mike’s contributions, which won’t be fully realized until after he retires, is the integration of behavioral health services with family medicine, a cause he’s worked years to achieve. Making an Impact “I wasn’t on the board at the time,” explains Mark Mossman, the current Virginia Gay Hospital board chair, “but I know that Virginia Gay was in terrible financial condition when Mike became the administrator. If my memory is right, the hospital had lost nearly $3M in ten years.” Once a Marine, Always a Marine is a phrase that certainly applies to Mike. He nearly lost his life in 1984 during the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon when a helicopter he was on lost power in two of its three engines. He became Virginia Gay’s administrator in 1994, not long after returning from active duty as 2nd platoon leader in Desert Storm, the allied effort to protect Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein annexed the tiny country. When he came back home, his new mission was to turn around a hospital on the verge of closing for good. Virginia Gay Hospital Board Chair Mark Mossman and Mike himself credit his military experience with the organizational skills needed to turn Virginia Gay around. “Mike has excellent organizational skills and a commitment to being both efficient and effective,” Mossman says. “Those were attributes Virginia Gay desperately needed.” Mike, on the other hand, does all he can to credit others with Virginia Gay’s turnaround. But as the date of Mike’s retirement grows nearer, he remains concerned about Virginia Gay’s future. “Rural hospitals may be entering another dark age, and I say that because, since 2009, almost 100 rural hospitals have closed. We are fortunate today to have an excellent staff, low debt, and a very strong balance sheet, but that doesn’t guarantee tomorrow’s success.” “Lead, follow, or get out of the way is a venerated principle for a Marine. As an officer in the Marines you’ve decided to lead, and leading means making decisions. The decisions of a military leader are often made under extreme pressure, and sometimes the result is soldiers and civilians losing their lives. I’ve learned as a leader in healthcare that there are no black-and-white decisions. The job requires fighting a constant battle to make wise choices in favor of the lesser of many evils. I can look forward to retirement knowing that the decisions of our medical staff - the decisions that as an administrator I’ve supported and respected - were made with one purpose in mind, and that was to improve the health and protect the safety of our patients.”