Memorial Joint Replacement Center at Memorial Hospital West continues to grow and exceed safety, quality and service expectations, with an 83 percent increase in case volume since the program’s inception in 2015 and an overall patient satisfaction rate of 98 percent during the past year.

Memorial Hospital West is the first out of more than 300 hospitals in the Marshall Steele Joint Replacement database, a gold standard for joint replacement surgery, to implement the Joint Replacement Center Outpatient Therapy Program. The program offers individual and group physical therapy focused on early mobilization. More than 76 percent of the center’s patients are walking continuous distances greater than 300 feet prior to discharge, exceeding the Marshall Steele average.

With an exclusive surgical unit dedicated to the entire spectrum of joint replacement, the center nearly tripled its capacity in the last year. The facility recently moved from the hospital’s main building to a new wing featuring a 40-bed unit to accommodate the program’s growth, including a new physical therapy area and a more aesthetically pleasing layout.

“The major advantage of coming to our center is that we have a streamlined and efficient process that decreases the length of stay. In terms of length of stay and discharge rate home, we’re in the top 10th percentile in the country,” said Carl Eierle, MD, Medical Director, Joint Replacement Center.

The Joint Replacement Center provides exceptional patient- and family-centered care that includes a patient care coordinator and a dedicated orthopedic team. The Center also has standardized the continuum of care by establishing best protocols and measuring outcomes, allowing the care team to be more patient-centered.

For more than a year, Norma lived with fairly constant osteoarthritis pain in her left knee. The pain worsened with long walks and when moving from a sitting to standing position, severely impacted her quality of life. At times, it would wake her from sleep.

“I was pretty much bone on bone,” said Norma, a runner, spin instructor and avid bike rider who underwent a total knee arthroplasty at Memorial Hospital West’s Joint Replacement Center.

Primarily focused on hip and knee replacements, the Joint Replacement Center is a coordinated effort to optimize the surgical process and outcomes for joint replacement. One of the cutting-edge elements used at the center is customized instrumentation, where the patient’s radiology data is collected to develop surgical instruments that will only work with that particular patient. The instruments help reduce blood loss and facilitate overall recovery.

“Patients who have had one knee or hip done elsewhere and then come here notice a dramatic difference. We’ve standardized a lot of our processes to streamline the surgery and the recovery,” said Norma’s surgeon, Daniel Sheldon, MD, Medical Director, Orthopaedic Surgery, Memorial Healthcare System, Western Division, and Chief of Surgery, Memorial Hospital West.

Norma, 60, was up and out of bed the same day of her surgery, and able to start physical therapy right away. She was discharged two days later and resumed her active lifestyle after completing outpatient therapy.

“The expertise and the care I received at Memorial alleviated the fear I had going into this,” she said. “Everyone was very knowledgeable, caring and interested in my recovery. I felt like my hand was held every step of the way, and that meant the world to me.”