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Getting Here
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Milestones at the University of Maryland Medical Center
Milestones at UMMC in the last 15 years. more>

UMMS Centers of Excellence
UMMS includes the University of Maryland Medical Center, with the following major components:

University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) is a private, not-for-profit teaching hospital system with 665 licensed beds and 224 intensive care beds at its downtown Baltimore campus. It provides a complete range of inpatient and outpatient services to more than 300,000 patients a year.

UMMS is committed to healing, teaching and discovering. Founded in 1823, it is the site of the oldest teaching hospital in continuous use in America. Its tradition of medical firsts continues today and will persist into the future.

In 2006 the Medical Center was named to the first-ever list of the nations's 50 best acute-care hospitals by the Leap-Frog Group. The Leap-Frog Group uses objective criteria to rate hospitals based on outcomes and patient volume for selected high-risk procedures in addition to staffing levels and specific measure take to ensure patient safety.

In 1997 UMMS was the recipient of the U. S. Senate Productivity Award, the first health care provider to win this award since it was established. The award recognizes exceptional achievements in quality and productivity.

UMMS is also the site of many new procedures and treatments being offered at only a handful of hospitals nationwide. Our health care professionals are dedicated to finding answers to difficult medical conditions and putting these discoveries to work for our patients.

Our health care system is dynamic, continually growing and helping to pioneer new treatments for many critical illnesses. Advances in medical research and pharmacotherapeutics, as well as our understanding of the body's ability to fight disease, give the potential for miraculous discovery every day.

Milestones at the UMMC in the Last 15 Years

UMMC is a leader in the minimally-invasive surgical revolution:
Fifteen years ago, the only way to have your gall bladder removed was through a big incision. People stayed in the hospital for a week and spent the next 4-6 weeks recuperating. Today, the laparoscopic removal of a gall bladder is the standard of care--with a much shorter recovery and barely any scars. In 1989, the Medical Center was the first hospital in the Northeast U.S. to perform laparoscopic gall bladder removals.

OR of the Future

“OR of the Future" is an outgrowth of the Medical Center’s leadership in performing many operations in a minimally-invasive way. UMMC opened the nation’s most sophisticated new surgical facility, outfitted with the most advanced computer and video equipment, in 2003. The facility, located in the Medical Center’s new 380,000-square-foot Weinberg Building, features 19 operating rooms for adult and pediatric patients, a 28-bed Post Anesthesia Care Unit and a new Surgical Prep Center with a separate child-friendly area exclusively for younger patients.

The laparoscopic removal of kidneys from living donors, which UMMC began to perform in March 1996, has made the Medical Center one of the top kidney transplant centers in the U.S. Since then, UMMC has performed more than 1,000 of these minimally-invasive kidney removals for transplant.

In the last 15 years, UMMC have also performed Maryland's first single lung transplant, the state's first pancreas alone transplant, and its first successful simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplant.

UMMC is a nation leader in providing new, lifesaving heart pumps for people with heart failure. Some pumps keep patients alive as they wait for a heart transplant and others are being tested as permanent treatment for those ineligible for a transplant.

UMMC have been the first medical center in the U.S. to implant the latest generations of pumps, which have enabled advanced heart failure patients to go home from the hospital and resume normal lives.

UMMC is a national "center of excellence" for the surgical treatment of emphysema with lung volume reduction surgery--which means they are one of just a few centers approved for Medicare coverage in performing that procedure.

The Medical Center is known for successfully separating conjoined twins from Africa in 2002. The girls had shared a heart vessel, diaphragm, sternum, chest and abdominal walls. Today, they live in Baltimore and are healthy and doing very well.

New direction for stroke care: Fifteen years ago, stroke patients were hospitalized for observation and supportive care. Today, physicians at UMMC intervene rapidly with clot-busting drugs that can prevent death and serious disability from a stroke. The Medical Center developed Maryland's first "brain attack" team and consider a stroke an emergency that requires immediate intervention, just like a heart attack.

UMMC is the first hospital in Maryland (in 12/04) to receive designation from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) as a Primary Stroke Center. The designation shows that the Medical Center’s stroke program meets JCAHO’s rigorous new standards and performance measurements in caring for stroke patients and offering state-of-the-art treatments. For this designation, the standards require hospitals to provide excellent patient care, including rapid assessment by a multi-disciplinary team, and the most advanced treatment with clot-busting medications.

In 1992, UMMC opened the region's first Gamma Knife to treat brain tumors and vascular malformations in the brain with high dose radiation. The radiation is targeted precisely to the tumor, sparing normal tissue. Physicians at UMMC have treated more than 2,000 patients so far with the Gamma Knife (and have expanded its use to help patients with trigeminal neuralgia).

In 2005, the Medical Center installed Trilogy, the most advanced radiation therapy technology available to precisely and rapidly treat patients for a wide range of cancerous tumors.

In the past decade, UMMC were one of the nation's first medical centers to repair "wide neck" brain aneurysms with a new, non-surgical stent/coiling technique, providing a non-surgical option to treat people with life threatening brain aneurysms. Physicians at UMMC also now repair abdominal aortic aneurysms without major surgery by threading a mesh device into the aorta via a catheter inserted into an artery.

Because of advances in imaging technology, physicians at UMMC now treat cancer by applying chemotherapy or radiation directly to the tumor without surgery, sometimes by threading catheters up blood vessels. This is now being done for liver and colon cancer. UMMC was also among the first to use MammoSite for treating breast cancer.

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For further information on the University of Maryland Medical System, please visit www.umm.edu