At Middle Park Medical Center changes abound. The hospital is adding new doctors, expanding currently offered specialties and opening a new location. With all that change, officials at the hospital decided a new name was in order.

Effective Friday, all of the Middle Park Medical Center locations, including the Granby and Kremmling campuses, the Winter Park urgent clinic, the Fraser physical therapy center and the North Park clinic in Walden, will be known as Middle Park Health.

Tiffany Freitag, director of community relations, said the name change came about for a few reasons. First, there was some confusion in the community about what locations the name Middle Park Medical Center referred to, especially since the Kremmling campus had been previously established as Kremmling Memorial Hospital.

“In the past there’s been confusion of who we are,” Freitag said. “When we adopted the name Middle Park Medical Center, a lot of folks assumed that was just the Granby location and really that was supposed to be an umbrella name. We just want to make sure folks know that Middle Park Health is all of our locations.”

The name change also reflects the hospital’s shift to focus on preventative care and general health, as well as emergency situations. Freitag said this follows a larger trend across healthcare.

“We want to not only care for people when they’re sick or injured, but also make efforts to improve overall health of the community,” she said. “We’re a pretty healthy, fit and active community to begin with, so I think they’re ready for that shift.”

Freitag said the change will be slow so that the hospital can plan financially for all the changes to come. The first step will be simply changing their name in all advertising.

“We don’t want it to be just a big blow right now financially,” she said. “It will take some time before you see the signage change. Our ads will change, but we still have things like pens that are still floating around that are always going to have Middle Park Medical Center on them.

Since the hospital is phasing the change, Freitag did not know the total cost of the name change.

She predicts that it will take a year or two to complete all the work needed to change the name, including updating signs at the hospital locations, updating marketing tools like pens and business cards and educating the public.

The new name also comes in time for the planned clinic in Grand Lake.

“We thought we should do it now before we keep adding locations,” Freitag said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported North Park Medical Center in Walden is a hospital. It is a clinic.