SKANEATELES — Dr. Marc P. Pietropaoli, founder and owner of Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics in Skaneateles, has built his practice on treating athletic injuries during practice, game situations, or just everyday leisure. Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics, which operates at 791 W. Genesee St. in Skaneateles, focuses on the treatment of joint replacements, torn […]
SKANEATELES — Dr. Marc P. Pietropaoli, founder and owner of Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics in Skaneateles, has built his practice on treating athletic injuries during practice, game situations, or just everyday leisure.
Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics, which operates at 791 W. Genesee St. in Skaneateles, focuses on the treatment of joint replacements, torn ligaments, fractures, pulled muscles, knee and shoulder injuries, and aims to help its patients return to their active lifestyles or sports.
The practice targets athletes with its sports-medicine expertise, and orthopedics covers a wide range of musculoskeletal problems in any age category, ranging from babies up to people over 100 years of age, says Dr. Marc Pietropaoli.
Pietropaoli says, “48 percent of our patients are over the age of 50, so it’s almost 50-50 as far as the age of 50.”
Pietropaoli is an orthopedic surgeon and the sole owner of the practice, which he started in April 2001.
The practice also handles workers’-compensation injuries, and arthritis and degenerative conditions that have slowed patients down, he says.
Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics consists of departments that include orthopedics and sports medicine, physical therapy, athletic training, radiology, and clinical (nursing). The practice has seen more than 20,000 patients, but Pietropaoli isn’t sure how many patients Victory sees on an annual basis.
Victory employs 40 full-time and four part-time employees, Pietropaoli says.
The full-time employees include a physician assistant, a nurse practitioner, five physical therapists, two physical-therapy assistants, seven athletic trainers, two massage therapists, and one personal trainer.
The part-time employees include two X-ray technicians, he says.
The practice on March 25 announced the hiring of Jason Cherry as its director of physical therapy. The practice is also hoping to add to its nursing staff, and hire a part-time physician assistant.
“We’re always looking for good people, and there are always spots open if the person is the right fit,” Pietropaoli says.
Pietropaoli says Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics grew its revenue by 20 percent in 2012, but he declined to provide revenue totals. He also declined to offer a revenue projection for 2013.
Gait and balance & baseball
Besides athletic injuries, Victory is concerned about injury prevention and believes that early detection of gait and balance disorders will reduce a patient’s chance of falling or getting hurt.
Victory’s gait and balance program is used to screen patients to determine if they’re at risk for falling. It uses some sophisticated electronic equipment, says Pietropaoli.
“If they [the patients] are at risk, it can be sometime due to musculoskeletal problem, sometimes due to a neurologic problem, and sometime due to an inner-ear problem [such as vertigo],” he says, noting that his practice can then design a rehabilitation program for that patient.
Each year, he says one of three people over the age of 65 falls and is injured, and 2.2 million of those cases need some type of medical attention.
One out of 10 falls leads to a serious injury, Pietropaoli says.
Besides his work as an orthopedic surgeon, Pietropaoli also serves as the team physician for the Auburn Doubledays minor-league baseball team. He’s also worked with the Syracuse Chiefs when both clubs were minor league affiliates of the Toronto Blue Jays. Now, both clubs are affiliated with the Washington Nationals.
On March 2, Pietropaoli traveled to Viera, Fla. to help administer entrance physicals to all 75 baseball players at the Washington Nationals spring-training camp.
Future plans
Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics leases its 6,000-square-foot facility from Victor Ianno, but Pietropaoli declined to disclose his monthly lease payment.
“We’re pretty cramped and running out of space here,” he says, noting the practice does have plans to expand at some point in the future.
Pietropaoli says the practice has been working on a project called the “Victory campus,” which will eventually occupy 100 acres of land the practice owns on the east side of Skaneateles off Route 20.
The project would include an integrated health-care, sports, and wellness complex on that property. It would increase its building size to a 61,000-square-foot medical, health, and wellness facility, along with indoor athletic facilities and outdoor athletic fields surrounding the building. The practice is still working with the Skaneateles town planning board on all the details.
“We don’t have a definite exact timetable at this time,” Pietropaoli say.
A native of Rochester, Pietropaoli graduated from Syracuse University in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. He then earned his medical degree from the State University of New York (SUNY) Health Science Center (now Upstate Medical University) in 1992 and later completed his orthopedic-surgery residency program in 1997 followed by a fellowship in orthopedic sports medicine at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala. in 1998.
Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com