Waterford — After 38 years of fixing broken bones, caring for workers injured on the job and operating on the backs and shoulders of southeastern Connecticut residents, Dr. Frank Maletz reluctantly is preparing to stop doing orthopedic surgeries and seeing patients, at least temporarily.

“I am not retiring,” Maletz, 64, said during an interview last week, between a busy week of patient appointments and making arrangements to close his office in the Crossroads Professional Building on Parkway South by the end of the month. “I was not planning this. I wanted to go out on my own terms, in six or seven more years.”

Last month, patients of Maletz and the three other orthopedic surgeons in the office received a letter from Hartford HealthCare informing them that the practice would be closing Oct. 31.

Hartford HealthCare, the hospital network The William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich is part of, gave no reason for the closure. It advised patients to have their medical records transferred to one of six practices located in five communities: North Franklin, Niantic, Norwich, Farmington and New Haven.

Maletz’s practice, previously called Crossroads Orthopedics, joined the Backus network in 2014 and became known as Backus Physician Services Orthopedic Surgery. It was subsequently folded into Hartford HealthCare when Backus became part of the larger network. He said he joined the Backus network at a time when Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London, where he had been affiliated, appeared unstable and he wanted to ensure his practice would remain viable.

By becoming part of the hospital network, Maletz and his colleagues were something of an anomaly among fellow orthopedic surgeons, most of whom have retained their own practices, said Dr. F. Scott Gray, president of the Connecticut Orthopedic Society. While many primary care doctors and some specialists are leaving private practices for hospital-run groups, orthopedic surgeons generally are “fiercely independent” and have resisted giving up their autonomy, Gray said.

“None of us want to have happen what happened to Dr. Maletz,” he said. “I feel really bad for him. The practice was railroaded. And now there are thousands of patients who can’t see the doctors who used to care for them.”

Instead of joining a hospital network to remain viable, Gray said he and about 50 other orthopedic surgeons around the state recently have formed Orthopedics New England, a consortium of private practices that can get discounts on malpractice insurance and negotiate as a group for reimbursement rates with insurance companies, but still retain control over hiring, firing and other areas.

“Dr. Maletz made a decision (to join the hospital network) so patients wouldn’t lose access to him, and now look what those businessmen did to him,” Gray said.

Under the agreement to turn over ownership of the practice to the network, Maletz and his colleagues were paid a salary and bonuses by Hartford HealthCare. Now, a month after state regulators approved the affiliation of L+M with the larger Yale-New Haven Health network, Maletz feels like a victim of Hartford HealthCare’s corporate indifference rather than a doctor who did the right thing for his patients and himself.

Hartford HealthCare, he said, never faulted his performance or that of the other doctors there — Joseph Noonan, Jeffrey Salkin and Thomas Cherry. Of these three, only Cherry is ready for retirement, Maletz said. All three declined to comment for this story.

“We hooked our nag to the wrong horse,” Maletz said. “They’re just cutting their losses and acting as if all the patient charts are theirs. This is very disruptive to the patients.”

The closure of the practice comes at a time when some patients and doctors question whether there are enough orthopedic specialists to serve southeastern Connecticut’s population, which will be needing more care for bones, joints and muscles as they age. Maletz said he and the other three doctors saw about 125 patients per week and performed about 500 surgeries annually.

Though the practice was part of the Hartford HealthCare network, it retained operating room privileges at L+M and did all surgeries there.

Bud Menghi of Niantic, for one, is angry. A patient of Noonan, whom he called a caring and highly competent physician, Menghi said Hartford HealthCare’s decision “stinks.”

“You’ve got to wait four to six weeks now to get an appointment,” he said. “I don’t see how these other guys are going to handle all these patients. It’s horrible.”

Gray, the orthopedic society president, said some regions of the state have an oversupply of this specialty, while other areas have too few.

“There are access problems in certain pockets of the state,” he said.

The Hartford area, where Hartford HealthCare is based, has more orthopedic surgeons than it needs, while southeastern Connecticut has a shortage. Hartford HealthCare officials, however, believe southeastern Connecticut is adequately supplied with orthopedic doctors, said Shawn Mawhiney, spokesman for the network.

“It is the intention of Hartford HealthCare not to compete with our own resources,” he said. “We have determined that adequate coverage for orthopedic services in the New London and Waterford markets with a relationship to Backus Hospital already exists. We are confident that our decision to terminate our relationship with the group of surgeons at the Crossroads Professional Building will not impact patient access to quality orthopedic care.”

None of the six practices where Crossroads patients are being referred is owned by Hartford HealthCare; they're either independent practices or affiliated with other networks. Hartford HealthCare is, however, seeking to purchase a majority share of the Constitution Surgery Center East, which performs eye and orthopedic surgeries at its standalone center on Cross Road in Waterford, less than two miles from Maletz’s office. That practice includes five orthopedic surgeons. Mawhiney said the decision to close the practice had nothing to do with the decision to purchase Constitution. 

Mawhiney said Hartford HealthCare plans to open neurology and oncology services in the Crossroads building, where it also has offices that provide primary care and physical rehabilitation services.

“Backus Hospital will continue to focus our resources on providing more access to primary care services in New London County, which has been identified as a service of greater need to our patients,” he said.

Dr. Jeffrey Miller, a private practice orthopedic physician in New London, said he believes the region has a sufficient number of orthopedic surgeons. L+M, on its website, lists 11 orthopedic surgeons affiliated there, while Backus lists 17. Several of the doctors are affiliated with both hospitals.

“There are great orthopedic surgeons in this region who I believe will be able to continue to provide the orthopedic services that are needed,” he said. “I believe we have an adequate supply of fine orthopedic surgeons to treat the population.”

Maletz, however, questions whether patients will agree, especially if they are covered by Medicaid or TriCare — the health insurance for military families — or are seeking care for a worker’s compensation-related injury. Maletz said his practice handled a large portion of those kinds of cases for the region.

“I don’t know where all these patients are going to go,” he said.

Attorney Lance Proctor of Waterford has been both a patient of Maletz and worked with him as the lawyer for about 50 clients with worker’s compensation injuries cared for by Maletz. Several of his family members also have been cared for by Maletz.

“He’s the best patient advocate I’ve ever seen,” Proctor said. “It’s an immense loss. He’s getting the rug pulled out from him by corporate America. And you’ve got waiting lists now to see doctors.”

Maletz said he is hoping to reopen his practice in the future, possibly under the Yale-New Haven-L+M umbrella.

“But we have to go through this process of practice closure first,” he said.

L+M spokesman Mike O’Farrell said his hospital is aware of the situation with Maletz and his colleagues. He declined to comment specifically other than to say that joint replacement and orthopedic care is “a hugely important part” of services provided by L+M.

“There’s clearly a need in this area,” he said.

j.benson@theday.com