Putting Quality Health Care Within Reach for All
As an anchor institution for Maryland and in each of the communities our hospitals serve, the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) is committed to delivering a better state of care to all.
We are creating a system of care in which everyone — patients, families, our team members and community partners — can thrive.
For instance, we know that every person we serve is better off, if we do a better job of addressing:
- Diabetes in rural neighborhoods
- Severe complications in childbirth
- Heart disease among women
We carefully consider our patients’ needs and the barriers they may face to living a healthy life. Then we create internal systems, guidelines and programs aimed at breaking down those barriers.
We deliver high-quality health care to all by...
Meeting People Where They Are: Serving Our Patients and Communities
Guided by our values of diversity, compassion and integrity, we work to adapt to our patients' social, cultural and linguistic needs by providing:
Language Interpretation - Every one of our hospitals offers language interpretation services to ensure patients and providers can communicate effectively.
Spiritual Care - Our pastoral care teams strive to meet the spiritual needs of all our patients, families and staff. This includes people of all faiths and those who are not religious.
Accessibility - We ensure that not only are our facilities accessible, but also that our messaging meet the needs of those whose disabilities may affect communication.
Transportation - Access to health care often depends on access to transportation. This is true for rural, urban and suburban communities. To address this, UMMS has partnered with Lyft in areas that have rideshare services. And in rural or other areas, we are addressing transportation issues via mobile vaccine and wellness clinics.
Always Challenging Ourselves: Advancing Health Care for All
Guided by our values of discovery, excellence and integrity, we look at the bigger picture and uncover where we need to make changes to ensure all patients receive the same level of care.
We focus on delivering safe, high-quality care that does not vary based on patients’ age, gender, education, income, location, race or ethnicity.
After examining which communities may have poorer outcomes in health and wellness, we work to develop solutions to address those neighborhoods' specific needs. We identify potential barriers to make our services more accessible to groups that have historically been underserved.
We do this by creating data dashboards that identify and monitor avoidable differences in outcomes. We then use those dashboards to make evidence-based action plans to close those gaps, such as with diabetes and pediatric asthma.
As a System, we have also stopped using versions of clinical decision-making tools that use race as a factor:
- We use a race-free method of evaluating kidney function. Moving away from a previous tool for estimating kidney function that used race as a factor has increased access to specialty care or transplantation for thousands of Black people living with advanced kidney disease.
- We no longer use the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) calculator, which assigned a higher risk to Black or Hispanic American women in certain complicated births. Taking race and ethnicity out of the decision-making process is an important step toward eliminating differences in the health and wellness of mothers and babies.
