University of Maryland Medical System Breaks Ground on Logistics Operations Center in Baltimore County’s Tradepoint Atlantic Complex

With a focus on maximizing operational efficiencies, the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) has signed a lease and broken ground on a 400,000 square-foot Logistics Operations Center (LOC) which will be built at the Tradepoint Atlantic complex in the Sparrows Point area of Baltimore County. 

The largest health care system serving the state, UMMS delivers 25 percent of all hospital care in urban, suburban and rural communities in Maryland.

• Annually, UMMS uses more than 95 million exam gloves, 3.5 million isolation gowns, 3 million masks, 1 million IV fluid bags and almost 8.5 million needles and syringes.  
• Across its hospitals, emergency centers, freestanding medical facilities and urgent care locations, the System has more than 2,450 licensed beds and annually sees more than 100,000 admitted patients, treats more than 1.2 million outpatients and provides care during nearly 330,000 Emergency Department visits.
• Each facility has thousands of unique medical items to support patient care needs.

“Our mission is simple: Provide the highest quality care to patients and families and serve as anchor institutions in our communities. Given the complexity of healthcare, delivering on our mission demands extraordinary efficiency, attention to detail, mistake-proof processes and world-class logistics capabilities,” said Mohan Suntha, MD, MBA, the System’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Our vision is for this new center to function as a logistics hub for the System, which will allow for safer and more efficient operations at every hospital and in every care location.”

In addition to housing the System’s supply chain operations, the center will house pharmacy operations with the intent to better manage high-cost drug purchasing and utilization, reduce waste, and better serve UMMS facilities, as well as clinical engineering operations which will provide enhanced equipment staging and repair. Future considerations include laboratory and sterile processing operations.  

“Tradepoint Atlantic is excited to welcome UMMS to our growing community of world-class organizations,” said Marc Salotti, Tradepoint Atlantic’s Managing Director. “The addition of a healthcare leader like UMMS contributes further to the broad mix of industries served through Tradepoint and the hospital system’s investment will further add to the diverse set of career opportunities available at Sparrows Point.”  

Sitework is now underway for the center, with construction taking an estimated 15 months and an opening expected in quarter 2 of 2025. The Logistics Operations Center will allow UMMS to stage, store, process and deliver critical supplies and services across the System, facilitate efficient staging and repair of medical equipment and create additional capacity within System member organizations. The center will also enable UMMS to leverage key partnerships with key supply chain and logistics partners. 

“Opening the Logistics Operations Center will allow us to improve standardization, reduce waste and build readiness and preparedness,” said Jon Burns, the System’s Chief Administrative Officer. “Additionally, it will create value and long-term savings through inventory management and control, reduced duplication and waste and less use of non-essential space across our facilities.”

“This center will allow us to consolidate all of our supplies in one distribution location so we can be even more focused on managing the logistics around all of the details that go into providing world-class clinical care,” added Pat Vizzard, Vice President of Supply Chain Management for UMMS. “Having the right items, in the right place at the right time is key to providing a safe environment for patient care.”

The Logistics Operations Center will also allow UMMS to close gaps in vulnerabilities found during its response to the COVID pandemic, such as the ability to bulk buy certain supplies and anticipate industry shortages and have better inventory management.

About the University of Maryland Medical System

The University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) is an academic private health system, focused on delivering compassionate, high quality care and putting discovery and innovation into practice at the bedside. Partnering with the University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Maryland School of Nursing and University of Maryland, Baltimore who educate the state’s future health care professionals, UMMS is an integrated network of care, delivering 25 percent of all hospital care in urban, suburban and rural communities across the state of Maryland. UMMS puts academic medicine within reach through primary and specialty care delivered at 11 hospitals, including the flagship University of Maryland Medical Center, the System’s anchor institution in downtown Baltimore, as well as through a network of University of Maryland Urgent Care centers and more than 150 other locations in 13 counties. For more information, visit www.umms.org.