Members of the Baltimore City Council voted Tuesday to advance a proposal that would set a new, higher property tax rate on vacant and abandoned houses, a first step toward cementing the bill into law. If passed by the rest of the council, the special tax rate could take effect as early as July 2026, bill co-sponsors Odette Ramos and Eric Costello said at a Tuesday committee hearing in City Hall. The bill received unanimous co-sponsorship by every member of the council when it was introduced earlier this month, a rarity relative to most pieces of legislation that move through City Hall.

 

Maryland’s U.S. Senate race is not neck-and-neck, according to the latest polls, which give Democrat Angela Alsobrooks an edge over Republican Larry Hogan. However, given that Maryland’s registered Democrats outnumber their Republican counterparts by more than two to one, some political experts call the race to fill the open Senate seat surprisingly close. The leading candidates are taking nothing for granted.

Imagine this: a young Maryland mother is rushed by EMS to a nearby emergency department after a severe car crash, a store clerk arrives after being struck by a stray bullet on his way to work, and a man suffers a heart attack on a nearby street corner. All three arrive at the hospital within minutes of each other, all needing critical care. The emergency department (ED) has only one available bed.

Jennifer, an ED nurse, and her team are stretched because they know there is also a person with a severe migraine who has been facing intense pain and throwing up for two days and an elderly person who fell. Both have been waiting over two hours for care. Despite these challenges, Nurse Jennifer and the rest of the ED team roll up their sleeves and get to work saving lives and providing comfort.

Hospital teams face tough decisions—not just about who to treat first, but how to manage an overwhelming and unpredictable influx of patients with limited resources.

Throughput is a critical issue across the nation. The complexity of managing patient care and flow while ensuring high-quality care means that hospitals must continuously adapt and innovate. Despite the best efforts of health care professionals, wait times remain a significant challenge in Maryland, exacerbated by factors beyond the control of hospitals, such as a limited number of hospital beds across the state, a lack of behavioral health and primary care, issues with post-acute care referrals, and payer denials.

Maryland hospitals have not stood idle. Through collaborative efforts like the statewide Maryland Hospital Association Hospital Solutions Collaborative, the General Assembly Hospital Throughput Work Group, and the Health Services Cost Review Commission’s (HSCRC) Emergency Department Dramatic Improvement Effort (EDDIE project), significant strides are being made. Several innovative approaches have emerged as best practices—reducing ED congestion while improving wait times and patient experience.

Impactful hospital initiatives include:

• Dedicated Clinical Pathways to identify stroke, Myocardial Infarction (heart attack), behavioral health crisis, and other patients in need of significant, immediate medical intervention. This brings better outcomes for patients while offloading ambulances more quickly and reducing overall ED wait times.
• FlexCare, FastTrack, or FastED tracks patients with less serious care needs to quickly treat them and make space for those with more serious medical emergencies.
• Waiting Room Care in some cases IV fluids, oral rehydration, or the first dose of antibiotic can be administered while a patient waits. This reduces overall throughput times by getting care started more expeditiously.
• Vertical Care where patients with less severe conditions can be assessed and begin treatment in chairs in a private area, rather than waiting for a bed to become available.
• Observation or Clinical Decision Units are in or adjacent to the ED. Patients who require less intensive treatment are placed in these units where they get accelerated care with the aim to discharge them within 24-48 hours.
• Rapid Discharge or Expediting Teams speed up the lab work, images, and other procedures or consults for inpatients. By expediting these processes for current inpatients, the hospital makes room for ED patients with longer-term medical needs to be moved into the opened beds.
• Discharge or Hospitality Lounges provide inpatients who are medically stable and able to go home with a comfortable space to wait for additional support. These discharged patients go to the lounge to get assistance with transportation, medications, or a nutritious meal, opening a hospital bed.

In addition, there are many other emergency department-based programs including palliative care, patient navigators, social workers, and community health workers to support needs far beyond the patient’s hospital stay. Follow-up appointments are set, and patients and their caregivers are educated so they have the tools to care for themselves at home. While these processes may actually add to the length of time spent caring for a patient, they ensure each person is safe to go home with the hope that they can avoid readmission.

Back to Nurse Jennifer and her team, they quickly work to stabilize the gunshot victim while getting him to an operating room. The heart attack victim is rushed to the cardiac catheterization lab where a dedicated care team begins life-saving treatment. The expediting team quickly evaluates the young mother. They find she is suffering from severe traumatic brain injury, and she’s immediately sent in for surgery. Of all the patients mentioned, only the young person with the migraine can be treated (in vertical care) and discharged. Though critical patients get immediate care from the ED doctors, nurses, and others, there are no hospital beds to move them to when their procedures are complete.

At the same time, the elderly fall patient has a slight pelvis fracture and cannot be released to his home. It is now past 8 p.m., and there is no way to get the patient’s insurance carrier to approve a move to a skilled nursing facility.

While hospitals are hard at work, there are numerous factors outside of their control that must be addressed at the same time. Access to community-based care, including primary care and behavioral health and substance use disorder services, must be expanded to reduce the burden on emergency departments. Additionally, the post-acute care sector faces workforce shortages, making it difficult to discharge patients who need longer-term support in a timely manner. Matters are made worse by the administrative burden and time associated with denials from insurance companies, especially for patients who are cared for in hospital emergency departments on evenings and weekends.

To address these challenges, we need enhanced capacity in post-acute care environments and a streamlined process for denials from payers. Denials and pre-authorizations make it difficult for hospitals to find the necessary aftercare environments for patients who are medically able to leave.

Progress is being made by hospitals around the state, but we know there is still work to be done across the health care continuum to improve throughput challenges that slow and delay ED discharges. By addressing the broader systemic issues, we can ensure that all Marylanders receive timely, high-quality care when they need it most.

The Maryland Hospital Association

The Maryland Hospital Association (MHA) represents more than 60 hospitals across the state. Composed of community, teaching, and specialty hospitals and health systems and aligned with the American Hospital Association, MHA aims to build healthy communities through healthy hospitals.

Shore up, is holding its annual Energy Week, a time when residents are able to come in and ask questions concerning their energy bills and obtain resources. We looked into this and can shed some light on this story. In today’s society, low to moderate-income families may struggle with paying for their electric or home heating bills. Shore Up, a local non-profit, says they might have a way to alleviate some of those winter worries.

The Maryland State Board of Education unanimously greenlighted policy changes Tuesday requiring school officials to share with one another certain information from transfer students’ criminal records. The policy, added Tuesday morning to Maryland State Board of Education’s agenda, comes after lawmakers raised concerns over communication pitfalls in the wake of two high school students being arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of a teenager in Columbia.

Mayor Brandon Scott said Tuesday that the $1.8 million request last month for emergency funds from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts convinced him to terminate the city’s contract with the quasi-governmental agency. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Scott told Tom Hall, host of “Midday with the Mayor” on WYPR-FM. “For me this was about responsibility. When I saw their fiscal situation and I knew how many taxpayer dollars were already being put into BOPA, this was the only decision that could be made.”

A Virginia banking company plans to acquire Maryland-based Sandy Spring Bancorp in a deal valued at about $1.6 billion, creating one of the mid-Atlantic region’s largest banks and cementing the merged bank’s presence in Maryland and Northern Virginia. Atlantic Union Bankshares Corp., based in Richmond, said it entered an all-stock merger agreement with Olney-based Sandy Spring, the eighth-largest bank in the Baltimore region and the seventh largest in the state, based on deposits.

Maryland has some of the strongest abortion protections in the country, a longstanding Democratic supermajority in the state legislature, and a governor who proclaimed the state a “safe haven” for the procedure. Now, voters will decide whether to add yet another safeguard. If Question 1 passes on a simple majority Nov. 5, it would enshrine a right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution.

The Frederick County Health Department in fiscal year 2024 served more residents in various ways and fully launched a program to combat the opioid epidemic by providing assistance to emergency medical service responders. The department’s latest annual report, covering operations and achievements for the previous fiscal year, mentioned statistics for how many people used certain services, as well as updates on programs like harm reduction trainings and grant programs.

The University of Maryland Medical System broke ground on a new $540 million hospital on the Eastern Shore Monday after years of work and development. At a time when many hospitals in rural areas are closing down due to financial struggles, UMMS is going in the opposite direction with the creation of the University of Maryland Shore Regional Medical Center in Easton. The new hospital replaces an outdated facility nearby and is the result of a long development process, said Kenneth Kozel, CEO and president at UM Shore Regional Health.