On March 1, the university's mail delivery service on the East Baltimore campus will merge with the service operated by The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The move, a recommendation of the Business Process Improvement Committee's Mail Services task force, is seen as phase one of a larger effort to provide greater coordination of the institutions' nine mail centers through the centralization of the JHU and JHH systems.

As a result of the merger, university mail service employees in East Baltimore will become employees of the hospital and report to Chester Wortham, director of special services for the Johns Hopkins Health System. The four entities affected are the hospital and the schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health.

Wortham said the purpose of integrating the two operations is to expedite mail processing and improve customer service.

"Our simple intent is to make mail delivery more efficient," Wortham said. "There are so many similarities between all the mail operations here that keeping them separate no longer made sense."

The BPIC task force, chaired by Audrey Smith, vice president for human resources, was charged with creating a faster, more reliable and more cost-effective Johns Hopkins mail service. Smith said other recommendations of the task force will follow and are expected to be announced in late spring.