News & Bulletins Archive
Please join us in welcoming Alice Middleton as Hilltop’s fourth executive director. Alice is a nationally recognized Medicaid subject matter expert and brings a wealth of experience to Hilltop. She joined Hilltop in 2017 as chief of staff, became deputy director in 2022, and has been serving as interim executive director since May 1, 2024, when Cynthia Woodcock retired.
Alice looks forward to continuing to lead the expert staff at Hilltop in this new role. She is eager to work closely with the Maryland Department of Health and other state agencies to navigate upcoming federal changes and identify new opportunities for innovative health policy and program evaluation. As Hilltop recently joined UMBC’s Division of Research and Creative Achievement, Alice is excited to strengthen collaborations with university faculty and leverage academic partnerships to enhance Hilltop’s research capabilities and impact.
Hilltop Director of Analytics & Research Morgan Henderson, PhD, is one of five awardees of UMBC’s Center and Institute Departmentally Engaged Research (CIDER) grants this year. Dr. Henderson will partner with Dr. Jun Chu, Assistant Professor of Public Health in UMBC’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Public Health to improve our understanding of the use of Z codes in the Maryland Medicaid population.
A New York Times article released today titled “The Biggest Medicaid Cut Left for House Republicans Would Hit Red States Hardest” features a follow-up to Hilltop’s analysis of the potential impact of eliminating the 6% Medicaid provider tax safe harbor threshold. This is a follow-up story to earlier coverage, and includes the impact of Managed Care Organization (MCO) taxes, in addition to hospital and nursing facility taxes. Today’s piece compares the distributional impacts of eliminating provider taxes with another proposed Medicaid reform.
A New York Times article released today titled “G.O.P. Targets a Medicaid Loophole Used by 49 States to Grab Federal Money” features Hilltop’s analysis of the potential impact of eliminating the 6% Medicaid provider tax safe harbor threshold.
Analysts from The Hilltop Institute collaborated with faculty from UMBC, UMCP, and the City of Frederick’s Asian American Center on a project titled “Lifting All Voices: Community-Based Language Access and Health Literacy Skill Building in Frederick, Maryland, to Achieve Health Equity and COVID-19 Public Health Objectives.” Funded through the Office of Minority Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the two-year project sought to develop, implement, and evaluate a targeted education program to improve access to culturally and linguistically appropriate COVID-19 information available to Frederick residents. Key findings from this project are featured in a recent post from the U.S Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
In a new article in the Health Affairs Forefront series, titled Reporting Requirements Matter (A Lot): Evidence from Arkansas’s Medicaid Work Requirements, Hilltop Director of Analytics & Research Morgan Henderson, Senior Director of Health Reform Studies Laura Spicer, and Interim Executive Director Alice Middleton discuss their re-examination of 2018-2019 enrollment data from Arkansas Works, the state’s Medicaid work requirement program.
The authors hope that this result can be used by states to model the enrollment impacts of potential Medicaid work requirement policies.
As of February 7, 2025, The Hilltop Institute at UMBC has expanded its predictive modeling portfolio to facilitate the delivery of advanced primary care for more than 2 million Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in Maryland via the Multi-Payer Reporting (MPR) Suite on Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP). This expansion marks a significant advance in the use of innovative data analytics to optimize primary care in Maryland and represents the state’s commitment to ensuring quality, high-value care for all.
A collaboration between The Hilltop Institute and the Maryland Department of Health (the Department) is featured in a new informational bulletin released by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) titled “Opportunities to Improve HIV Testing, Prevention, and Care Delivery for Medicaid and CHIP Beneficiaries.”
Hilltop is excited to announce Alice Middleton, JD as the continuing State-University Partnership Learning Network (SUPLN) Steering Committee (SC) Chair for the 2025-2026 term. Alice has been a significant contributor to SUPLN over the past several years. Last year, she seamlessly assumed the role of SUPLN SC Chair, leading the Network through its 10th anniversary year. We look forward to her continued leadership over the next year as SUPLN carries momentum forward on products, convenings, and collaborations and explores conducting the Network’s second strategic planning process.
In a new article in Health Services Research titled Evaluating a Predictive Model of Avoidable Hospital Events for Race- and Sex-Based Bias, Hilltop researchers Leigh Goetschius, Fei Han, Ruichen Sun, and Morgan Henderson—along with UMBC researcher Ian Stockwell—assessed a large, productionized predictive model of avoidable hospital (AH) events for bias based on patient race and sex.
In a new blog post written for AcademyHealth, published by AcademyHealth, and also published by The Hilltop Institute, Hilltop Interim Executive Director Alice Middleton discusses her pride in the accomplishments of the State University Partnership Learning Network (SUPLN) in its first decade—forging deep connections, sharing innovative approaches, and amplifying the real-world impact of its members’ work—and her vision for the network in the next decade—playing an even more critical role in sharing information and best practices as university researchers assist states to weather policy changes, public health crises, technology advances, and other unknowns in health care.
In a new article in Medical Care titled Behind the Curtain: Comparing Predictive Models Performance in 2 Publicly Insured Populations, Hilltop researchers Morgan Henderson, Leigh Goetschius, Fei Han, and Ruichen Sun—along with UMBC researcher Ian Stockwell—share the findings of a study they conducted on the inner workings of the Hilltop Pre-AH Model™, a large-scale predictive model that predicts the risk of avoidable hospitalizations and has been deployed in two distinct populations—Medicare and Medicaid—with a particular emphasis on adaptability issues.
Hilltop researchers Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Morgane Mouslim, DVM, SCM, have published an article in the August 2024 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care titled Cross-Validation of Insurer and Hospital Price Transparency Data. The first research of its kind, the piece compares the two different federally mandated sources of public, freely available health services price transparency data (insurer and hospital) for prices for maternity-related services negotiated between Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi and 26 Mississippi hospitals.
In a new blog post written for AcademyHealth and Milbank Memorial Fund, published by AcademyHealth, and also published by The Hilltop Institute, former Hilltop Executive Director Cynthia H. Woodcock makes the case that the success of a state-university partnership depends not only on the relationship between the state agency and university research partner, but also on the relationship between the university research center and its university leadership. She then gives her reflections on relationship building based on Hilltop’s 30-year partnership with the Maryland Department of Health and her 11-year experience as Hilltop’s chief executive.
Hilltop staff presented at the 2024 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (ARM) held June 29 – July 2 in Baltimore. Participants included Alice Middleton, Dolapo Fakeye, Leigh Goetschius, MaryAnn Mood, Roberto Millar, Parker James, Fei Han, Christine Gill, and Morgane Mouslim.