Franklin Medical Center

Baystate Health

Type	Not-for-profit corporation
Industry	Health care
Genre	Health care system
Founded	1883 (Originally Springfield Hospital)
Headquarters	Springfield, Massachusetts, United States
Area served	Western Massachusetts
Number of employees	12,000
Website	baystatehealth.org

Baystate Health is a not-for-profit integrated health system headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts, serving Western Massachusetts and the Knowledge Corridor Region of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The system has 4 hospitals, over 80 medical practices, and 25 reference laboratories. With 12,000 employees including 1,600 physicians, Baystate Health is one of Massachusetts' largest employers. Baystate also owns the for-profit insurer Health New England.

In 1974, Springfield Hospital Medical Center merged Wesson Women's Hospital to create the 672-bed Medical Center of Western Massachusetts. In 1976, the Medical Center of Western Massachusetts merged with Wesson Memorial Hospital. The merger established Baystate Medical Center, then the second-largest hospital in New England, with 1,036 beds.

In 1983, Baystate Medical Center was reorganized into three separate corporations: Baystate Health Systems, the parent corporation now renamed Baystate Health; Baystate Medical Center; and the for-profit corporation Baystate Diversified Health Services. The reorganization provided a legal framework for developing a future multi-institutional health care system and for reducing the assets that would be encumbered with the financing of a major new hospital building.

In 1986, Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield joined Baystate Health; in 1999, Baystate Mary Lane Hospital in Ware joined the health system. In 2004, the Visiting Nurse Association & Hospice of Pioneer Valley, now renamed the Baystate Visiting Nurse Association & Hospice, became a member of Baystate Health.

To this end, a major corporate restructuring in 1997 reduced the number of governing boards across BH from twenty-one to six. On January 1, 2004, the governance structure of Baystate Health was further simplified with the establishment of a single board of trustees for Baystate Health that also serves as mirror boards for its patient care entities that had previously been governed by a separate board.

In August 2016, a phishing scam of Baystate Health employees may have compromised some demographic and clinical information of as many as 13,000 patients. Baystate informed patients and stated social security numbers or financial or account information was not accessed in the scam.