New specialized observation unit at Howard County hospital seeks to reduce ER wait times

Howard County's only hospital will soon have a new unit on its grounds, part of an ongoing strategy to try and reduce wait times in the emergency room (ER).

Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center's new observation unit is the first significant incremental expansion since 2009.

WJZ has long reported about the issue of long waits in ERs, also known as emergency departments (EDs), across the state.

A sneak peek inside

The new observation unit is still getting ready for a December opening, but the excitement around it is palpable.

Hospital leaders, state and county leaders, longtime hospital donors, and other community members gathered Thursday for a ribbon cutting for the unit.

In the crowd was Christie Thiebeault, who is the hospital's Nursing Director of Emergency and Psych Services. She'll be one of the two nurses heading the unit.

"The unique thing about Howard County is it's the whole hospital looking to solve and fix the problem of ED boarding," Thiebeault said. "This unit in partiular will allow us to see patients and get them care that they need more quickly."

This observation unit will be for ED patients who need more short-term, specialized monitoring. It has 29 beds, all of which are private.

Of those 29, 11 have the ability to be converted to specialized "negative pressure" rooms for rapid respiratory isolation. That helps keep things contained to a single room and from spreading to other parts of the hospital.

There are also two airborne isolation rooms.

Ongoing ED strategy

The observation unit is the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at reducing ED wait times at the hospital.

Other efforts include creating a discharge hospitality suite in 2023 and unveiling an expanded behavioral unit in 2024.

That behavioral unit expansion helped increase the capacity for patients with those needs from six to 24. 

The latest data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows that the average wait at the ED in Howard County can be more than four hours.

The observation unit is expected to have an immediate impact as soon as it opens.

"The fact of the matter is that the demand for observation continues to increase. In this year alone, we had a 23% increase in the need for observation beds as compared to last year. So, the timing of this unit...could not come at a beter time for the hospital," said Ryan Brown, the hospital's COO. "We expect pretty immediate relief from the emergency department."

The observation unit took around three years to build, from planning to the end of construction. It cost $28 million, $15 million of which came from county funding.

State funding and donors also helped foot the bill.