Welcome from the Associate Vice Chair 

Committed to advancing a culture of excellence, safety, and reliability across our clinical enterprise.

As Associate Vice Chair of Quality and Patient Safety, I am honored to lead our Department's efforts to align clinical innovation, operational strategy, and patient-centered care to improve outcomes.

Over more than two decades, I have had the privilege of working alongside extraordinary colleagues to strengthen emergency care at the University of Maryland’s complex, high-acuity clinical sites. As Medical Director of the Emergency Department at the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Downtown Campus, I focused on reimagining care delivery—improving patient flow, expanding access, and addressing the challenges of crowding and boarding.

My colleagues and I view quality and patient safety as foundational to our work as Emergency Physicians. And we are committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement in all we do—from leading quality assurance and peer review initiatives to driving standardization in care and performance in time-sensitive conditions like sepsis.

In the past year alone, our Department has led significant accomplishments from a quality and safety perspective. We reduced our left-without-being-seen rates, renovated our Emergency Departments to fit the needs of our patients, and developed clinical protocols that ensure our sickest patients get the care they need.

Ultimately, excellence in emergency medicine requires both system-level rigor and human connection.  Protocol by protocol, process by process, patient by patient, our Department continues to work toward our goal to be a national leader in quality and patient safety in Emergency Medicine.

Angela Smedley, MD
Assistant Professor and Associate Vice Chair of Quality and Patient Safety
Department of Emergency Medicine
University of Maryland School of Medicine