Leslie Davis waits restlessly in the lobby of Magee-Womens Hospital for a staff member who plans to accompany her on a visit to the neonatal intensive care unit.

"I'm not used to standing around," said Davis, smoothing the folds of her power-red business suit and tapping her foot as an electronic player piano greets hurried visitors with strains of Sinatra.

But once Magee's president and chief executive officer enters the nearby NICU -- where doctors care for high-risk and premature infants -- any signs of impatience dissipate and her maternal instincts take over.

Davis watches Freda Hanley, of Canonsburg, Washington County, cradle her infant daughter, who is connected to a tangle of feeding and breathing tubes and swaddled in thick blankets that can't disguise the baby's perilously tiny size.

It is this blend of vitality and compassion -- her gutsy, yet nurturing management style -- that makes Davis ideally suited to take charge of transforming Magee from a hospital focused on obstetrics and gynecology into a full-service medical center, colleagues say.

"That's our agenda now, and a lot of the energy and talent in getting that done is coming from Leslie's office," said attorney William Pietragallo II, the hospital's board chair.

After spending nearly 20 years in various health care positions in Philadelphia, the decision to move with her husband and three school-age children across the state wasn't an easy one.

Davis was drawn to Pittsburgh by the goals set forth for Magee by Jeffrey Romoff -- who heads the ever-expanding University of Pittsburgh Medical Center system, which acquired the hospital on April 1, 1999.

"I was just struck by his vision, which was really to move Magee from being a great ob-gyn hospital to being a great hospital for women, and just a great medical-surgical hospital in general," she said. "That was a vision I could really grab on to."

In addition to its main hospital in Oakland, Magee also operates six Womancare Centers and five neighborhood health care centers in Allegheny County.

But since Davis took over, the hospital has opened a radiology department that provides sophisticated imaging services, a new lupus center, a women's mid-life health center, an orthopedic unit, a medical-surgical unit and a transitional care unit.

Magee also now boasts an expanded intensive care unit, a heart center, a weight reduction program and a plastic surgery department that performs 900 cosmetic, post-cancer reconstruction and bariatric procedures each year.

"It used to be that women would have their babies here and then have to go through the maze of UPMC and other hospitals to get the other health care services they need," Davis said. "What's really nice is it's all in one place now."

About 60 percent of the hospital's patients are women, but men are increasingly turning to Magee thanks to the broad range of services now being offered.

"We are trying to find the balance between creating an environment that's still focused on women and developing a more complete health care portfolio," Davis said.

Davis didn't set out to forge a career in hospital administration, but she always knew she would be a working woman thanks to the example set by her mother, a dental hygienist. Her father was a merchandiser for Montgomery Ward department store in Manhattan.

A native of Lawrence, N.Y. on Long Island, Davis attended college at University of South Florida, where she majored in Spanish-English education. During an internship at a Tampa middle school, however, she discovered that the daily routine of a teacher's schedule didn't mesh well with her go-getting personality.

She went on to earn a joint master's degree in business and health care administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Business School.

"Hospital administration just felt right," said Davis, who had her first hands-on experience in the field through a residency program at New England Medical Center in Boston. "It gives me the opportunity to keep doing new things, to reinvent myself and to reinvent the organization I'm working with and the people around me."

Davis was working as a controller at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City in the early 1980s, when she met her future husband, real estate attorney Abe Leizerowski, at a singles weekend in the Catskill mountains.

Davis moved soon afterward to Philadelphia to marry Leizerowski and began working as an administrator at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where she would spend 13 years. During that time, the couple had three children: Cory, 18, Tess, 16, and Hannah, 12, all students at Fox Chapel area schools.

In 1997, Davis was appointed chief operating officer of Presbyterian Medical Center of Philadelphia, before joining the University of Pennsylvania Health System, where she eventually became chief marketing and planning officer.

Prior to coming to Magee, she served as the first female president and CEO of the city's Graduate Hospital, which is part of Tenet Healthcare Corp. but used to belong to the now-defunct Allegheny Health, Education and Research Foundation.

When Davis walks through the halls of Magee, she exchanges warm banter with parking valets and doctors alike. She seems to know everyone's name -- and they all know her.

Although she quickly gained the respect and trust of the hospital employees, it still hasn't been easy for Davis to implement some of the cultural changes at Magee necessary to expand the scope of medical services while streamlining operations.

"It was probably an interesting and difficult transition for Leslie to come into a Pittsburgh institution with so many well-founded habits and customs and to do the things necessary to make changes," Pietrogallo said. "I admire her for that, and I'm a huge supporter of hers."

Even some of the smallest changes have been hard to make -- for example, it took months for Davis to convince the medical staff that pregnant women in labor should immediately enter the hospital's state-of-the-art birthing center rather than go to the emergency department first.

Among the other challenges Davis inherited when she took over the helm at Magee have been lawsuits filed in 2003 by two pathologists over electronic signatures on Pap tests.

The suits alleged that thousands of Pap smears were falsified in a bid to cut costs and attract business, and they also claimed Magee and UPMC retaliated against the doctors after they complained to outside authorities about Magee's practice of putting their signatures on Pap test reports that had actually been reviewed by junior staff.

"I'm sure Magee will have the opportunity to let the people of Allegheny County know that this is a fabulous place for lab services," Davis said.

"I don't think there's a person in the world who gets the balance right," she said. "My trick is just to multitask. Sometimes when I'm on my Blackberry at one of my kid's sporting events I feel a little guilty, but the reality is that I'm able to be at the event."

Having a supportive husband -- who retained his law practice in Philadelphia and also works locally for the CB Richard Ellis commercial real estate firm -- has been another key to Davis' success at home and in the office.

"We approach both of our careers as a partnership," she said. "It is our collective work -- how we can influence the community that we live in and how we raise our children together."

Running a major medical center and a household of five doesn't leave Davis with much leisure time -- there's always e-mail to answer, homework to check, evening board meetings to attend and lunches to pack. Any free hours are often spent being dragged through the mall by her daughters -- or preferably listening to classical music or skiing.

As Magee continues its renewal, so will Davis -- professionally and personally, as her family continues to establish itself in Pittsburgh. She sees herself as a conduit to provide the medical staff with the tools and resources needed to usher Magee into its new incarnation as a full-service health care provider.

She likes to tour the hospital regularly to talk with doctors and nurses and watch them in action. She chats with patients and pays attention to small details such as how long they wait in the lobby after being discharged and whether they have fresh magazines to read.

Following a year of rapid advances, plans are in the works to expand the hospital's emergency department and convert to all-digital mammography.

In another sign of growth, Magee-Womens Health Corp. -- parent of the hospital's fundraising arm -- is building a $31 million addition to double the size of the Magee-Womens Research Institute at the corner of Craft and Forbes avenues.

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