Like many people, Dr. Dan Morhaim has spent time waiting in a hospital. He recalled sitting for nearly an hour for a required wheelchair escort to his car after minor hernia surgery.

The reason the transporter gave for the delay: “There’s only one of me and 10 of you,” Morhaim said he was told by the worker. “If there were two or three of me it could reduce the wait.”

Morhaim is leaning on his experience as a former emergency room doctor and a former Democratic state delegate as he serves on a state commission to reduce Maryland’s emergency room wait times, which are among the longest in the nation.

But the panel itself is moving too slowly, Morhaim said.

Created by the state General Assembly in July 2024, it held its first meeting roughly six months later. The plodding and largely staff-driven effort is losing the attention of panel members, and its main output so far is a single report issued in November that doesn’t offer much guidance to hospitals.

Given the frustration and potential dangers tied to delays in treatment, Morhaim said he wants his group to make some immediate recommendations to hospitals and policymakers, at least for what he sees as relatively easy fixes.

Those could include hospitals hiring more transporters and housekeepers, who tidy beds between patients.

“The interim report does not offer much in the way of solutions,” he said during Wednesday’s meeting of the panel, where he reiterated points he also made in four pages of written comments.

In November, the panel released a report laying out how bad the wait-time problem is: The state has exceeded the national average for wait times for more than two decades.

State data reviewed by The Banner shows it can take a full day to admit patients at the worst-performing hospitals. Those who needed urgent care but didn’t need to be admitted to the ER — the majority of cases — waited an average of more than four hours, a Banner analysis of federal data found.

According to the panel’s report, some hospitals are making headway, but bottlenecks remain.

For example, there aren’t enough places for patients to go when they leave the hospital but still need to rehabilitate from illness, injury or behavioral health issues. Patients then back up hospital inpatient beds and emergency rooms.

Some of Morhaim’s ideas were tied to issues the panel highlighted in its report. He recommended developing a system to show in real time open beds at rehab and nursing facilities. He also suggested that hospitals develop more and flexible bed space for surges, such as during flu season.

Health systems could also put a greater focus on preventing people from needing the emergency room. Morhaim said that could mean redirecting “frequent flyers” to urgent or primary care and ensuring older people at risk for falls get home improvements.

Maryland hospitals have already been somewhat successful in preventing visits. But those who still use the emergency room are somewhat older and sicker, requiring longer stays and more medical attention.

Panel members and staff seemed receptive to Morhaim’s prodding, which was more earnest than confrontational. But it wasn’t clear if he had inspired greater or faster action.

“We’re at a point where we’ve got to decide what is a successful outcome for this commission,” said Jonathan Kromm, executive director of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, which oversees the wait-time commission.

Kromm said members will have to decide on recommendations, how “granular” to make them and whether the panel takes any other action before the end of year, when the final report is due.

For now, other panel members weren’t sure how much progress they’d made toward their mission.

“I’m not sure we’ve connected all the dots where we do this and that leads to that, and we think that we will make a difference,” said Dr. Ted Delbridge, executive director of the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems.

“And will that make a difference in our lifetimes?”