Melrose-Wakefield Hospital Recognized Nationally for Hip, Knee Replacements

Melrose-Wakefield Hospital, a member of Hallmark Health System, has been named a Blue Distinction Center for Hip and Knee Replacement® from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts for demonstrating better overall quality of care and patients results.

Blue Distinction® is a national designation awarded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies to medical facilities that have demonstrated expertise in delivering quality healthcare in the areas of bariatric surgery, cardiac care, complex and rare cancers, knee and hip replacements, spine surgery and transplants.

Melrose-Wakefield Hospital is home to the nationally recognized Bone & Joint Program, a regional leader in orthopedic care. This recent honor signifies that this program provides comprehensive inpatient knee and hip replacement services including total knee replacement and total hip replacement surgeries.

In addition to this Blue Distinction Center honor, patients in our community who went through the Bone & Joint Program recently reported a 99 percent patient satisfaction. This rating places our program in the top 1 percent nationally in patient satisfaction ratings.

To earn this designation, Melrose-Wakefield Hospital was evaluated based on an objective, evidence-based selection criteria established with input from expert physicians and medical organizations. The goal of the Blue Distinction is to identify medical facilities that deliver better overall quality and medical outcomes for a specific area of specialty care, helping patients and doctors to make more informed hospital choices.

“This designation is a tribute to the dedicated team of physicians, nurses, technicians and therapists who helped develop Melrose-Wakefield Hospital’s comprehensive Bone & Joint Program,” said William Doherty, MD, system vice president and chief medical officer at Hallmark Health. “Their clinical expertise in this area of specialty care has resulted in better overall results for our patients.”

“Blue Distinction puts a high value on the consistent delivery of evidence-based care,” said Dr. Allan Korn, chief medical officer of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA). “Blue Distinction Centers demonstrate our commitment to working with doctors and hospitals in communities across the country to identify leading institutions that meet objective quality criteria and deliver better overall outcomes in specialty patient care.”

About Blue Distinction

Blue Distinction selection criteria cover a broad range of quality measures and are publicly available on www.bcbs.com/bluedistinction. By earning the designation, Hallmark Health’s Melrose-Wakefield Hospital has demonstrated:

– An established program, performing required annual volumes for certain procedures
– Appropriate experience of its care team
– Full facility accreditation by a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)-deemed national accreditation organization
– Adherence to evidence-based clinical care measures and guidelines
– A comprehensive quality management program

To learn more about the Blue Distinction designation, visit www.bcbs.com/bluedistinction.

For more information about Hallmark Health, visit www.hallmarkhealth.org or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hallmarkhealth.

-Information from Hallmark Health