Phelps Hospital Earns Level 3 Epilepsy Center Accreditation

Phelps Hospital, part of Northwell Health, has earned Level 3 epilepsy center accreditation, a designation that recognizes the Sleepy Hollow, New York facility's capacity to deliver specialized medical and neurophysiological care to patients with epilepsy.

The accreditation places Phelps within the tiered center framework administered by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers (NAEC), the body that classifies epilepsy programs by the level of diagnostic and treatment services they provide. A Level 3 designation indicates a center equipped to handle routine epilepsy cases with appropriate neurodiagnostic monitoring, including scalp video-EEG, and to offer basic medical and neuropsychological evaluation, with referral pathways to Level 4 centers for patients requiring invasive monitoring or epilepsy surgery.

For referring neurologists and primary care physicians in the lower Hudson Valley region, the designation formalizes what Phelps can offer close to home: structured evaluation of seizure disorders by clinicians with epilepsy-specific expertise, supported by the diagnostic infrastructure of the Northwell Health system. Patients whose seizures resist standard pharmacologic management, or whose diagnoses remain unclear after noninvasive workup, retain a defined route into higher-level care at Level 4 centers within the network.

The NAEC accreditation process requires centers to document their staffing, monitoring capabilities, and clinical protocols against published guidelines for epilepsy care. These guidelines specify that a Level 3 center should provide the basic neurodiagnostic studies used in seizure classification — long-term scalp EEG monitoring among them — along with established treatments including antiseizure medication management, and should identify patients who need more advanced interventions.

Accreditation at this level signals a measurable institutional commitment rather than a one-time achievement. Centers must maintain the staffing and equipment standards that earned the designation, and NAEC encourages periodic reassessment to confirm continued compliance.

For a community hospital within a large health system, the practical effect is two-sided. Locally, it raises the standard of seizure evaluation available without requiring patients to travel to a major academic medical center. System-wide, it strengthens the triage function that NAEC's tiered model is designed to support: routing the routine and the complex to appropriately matched levels of care, so that intracranial monitoring and surgical evaluation remain concentrated at centers with the volume and multidisciplinary teams those interventions demand.

Phelps now joins the roster of NAEC-recognized epilepsy centers that patients and physicians can consult when deciding where to pursue seizure care. The designation is expected to support expanded access to epilepsy specialty services in the region as Northwell continues to build out its neurosciences service line.