The Best Care, Close to Home – New professionals join the medical community of Wilton’s Route 7
by Kimberly Monson
›› While showing off his mad lacrosse skills to an aloof yet flirty classmate, your obsessed teenager “blows out” his ankle. While insisting she can reach that food processor in the upper cabinet, your elderly mother-in-law takes a topple off the stepstool, fracturing her hip. After suffering in silence from chronic shoulder pain you are too stubborn to address, you are ultimately diagnosed with arthritis.
Ankle pain in detail – Sports injuries concept
All these scenarios have something in common—they are movement-related injuries or conditions part of the musculoskeletal system. Before a few short months ago, you’d have to travel to either NYC (which can get old…fast) or off to Stamford to find a top-notch orthopedic specialty hospital. Thanks to an in-demand expansion initiative, the Hospital for Special Surgery or HSS is now bringing its top nationally-ranked orthopedic medical expertise to Wilton, adding to the abundance of medical services offered
along Route 7.
Bottom: Maria Kansy, RN at HSS (left), Evan Sheha, MD, HSS, spine surgery (center), and Viviane Potucek, HSS Medical Office Manager (right) at a ribbon cutting ceremony for HSS Orthopedics at Stamford Health-Wilton in front of the Whitlock Building with John Finger, Senior Vice President of NY Regional Markets at HSS (center left) and Jonathan Bailey, Senior Vice President of Operations and Chief Operating Officer for Stamford Health (center right).
HSS Orthopedics at Stamford Health-Wilton, the latest addition to the HSS collaboration with Stamford Health in Connecticut, newly opened on November 8th at 195 Danbury Road, Suite 200 in the Wilton Crossing complex. The facility joins the already established 18,000- square foot Stamford Health Center located at 372 Danbury Road, as well as Nuvance Health at 249 Danbury Road. The new HSS collaboration facility offers well-rounded care for the following specialties: spine, sports medicine, physiatry, and adult reconstruction and joint replacement. HSS is the world’s leading academic medical center focused on musculoskeletal health. At its core, the Hospital for Special Surgery helps people keep moving by being the best care you can get in the country for Orthopedics. HSS is nationally ranked No. 1 in orthopedics (for the 12th consecutive year), No. 4 in rheumatology by U.S. News & World Report (2021-2022), and the best pediatric orthopedic hospital in NY, NJ and CT by U.S. News & World Report “Best Children’s Hospitals” list (2021-2022). HSS is ranked world #1 in orthopedics by Newsweek (2021-2022).
HSS Senior Vice President of Regional Markets, John Finger, explained opening HSS Orthopedics at Stamford Health-Wilton was a logical choice due to an existing relationship with Stamford Health and the established practice of Nuvance Health down the road. “We were completely out of space at our HSS Stamford Chelsea Piers location after just 5 years. With Stamford Health opening a collaborative physical therapy and sports rehabilitation space in Wilton last year, it was natural to come to this location for an HSS expansion.” Liz Longmore, RN and Senior Vice President of Ambulatory Services of Stamford Health adds, “you do not need to leave your community to get care, you can get the best services close to home.”
Dr. Cornelius Ferreira, Nuvance Health System Chair and Primary Care Physician emphasized the modern facilities and convenient Route 7 location mentioning the proximity to the train, but agreed with HSS about providing valuable services that people of the community need. “Nuvance is proud to offer metabolic and endocrinological offices to assist patients with obesity, diet, and hormone issues, which can include the needs of the transgender community.”
Nuvance Health also houses a neighborhood lab, so patients don’t have a long wait for test results. Dr. Ferreira adds, “Nuvance is constantly reassessing care and how it can better serve the community.”
Part of what makes this medical community so special, is that it is truly a community. “It is a more intimate treatment being in a small-town setting,” says Theodore Blaine, MD, Sports Medicine at HSS. “You don’t have to travel to Manhattan for state-of-the-art care because those doctors are now nearby in Wilton. We work with many CT regional High School sports teams such as Greenwich Country Day School, St. Luke’s, Darien, and Wilton. We also provide outreach promoting active lifestyles, mental health, and nutrition through specialized events and sponsorships. We recently had one of these events at Wilton High School.” John Finger added that HSS goes out to community centers such as the local YMCA and senior centers, educating the public by promoting musculoskeletal health and treatment options.
Nuvance Health also has an active partnership with the Wilton YMCA, providing a staff nurse who navigates people to proper care, advising on nutrition, diabetes, exercise, and heart health.
There is certainly a priority of the patient experience; more than 3,000 testimonials of grateful families, professional athletes, and individuals who have gotten “Back in the Game”* because of HSS. It’s Dr. Blaine who you’d see for that newly diagnosed debilitating arthritic shoulder pain, his specialty being the complex surgery of the shoulder and elbow. He also assures us that this ideal team of HSS Orthopedics at Stamford Health-Wilton doctors is exactly who you need to steward your love-struck and somewhat humiliated teenage lacrosse player through the process of stabilizing the growth plate in his ankle, or your elderly mother-in-law’s “I can reach it myself” hip injury that now requires surgery. In fact, Mr. Finger confided that it was Dr. Blaine he trusted with the broken bone his wife sustained hiking on the couple’s recent 35th anniversary trip to Yellowstone.
“My wife on the first day, on the first hike, fell and fractured her wrist, I thought it an extreme way to get out of having to spend 10 days in the woods with me. Ted [Dr. Blaine] was available and on the phone with us going over x-rays and options. I can speak from personal testimony, as an almost customer, to Ted’s quality and the expertise of HSS.”
All parties agree, their facilities in Wilton offer the best medical care close to home and are willing to work hard to keep it that way.
HSS Orthopedics at Stamford Health-Wilton is open Monday-Friday, from 9am to 5 pm.
The office number is (203) 705-2950. Appointment scheduling is made directly through each doctor’s respective office.
*Back in the Game, HSS Patient stories can be viewed by visiting https://backinthegame.hss.edu/ •
