News & Bulletins Archive

Hilltop continues to provide subject matter expertise as Mississippi lawmakers consider whether or how to expand Medicaid. Following up on the extensive study it conducted in 2022 that assessed the costs and savings to Mississippi if it were to expand Medicaid and recent testimony before the Mississippi House Medicaid Committee, Hilltop is continuing to conduct ad hoc analyses on various topics that emerge in the legislative deliberations. Hilltop has produced two follow-up explainers and provided subject matter expertise for a recent article in Mississippi Today that is following the deliberations.

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In a recently released podcast, The Hilltop Institute’s Analytics and Research team discuss their work on predictive modeling in Maryland.

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Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Executive Director Cynthia Woodcock, MBA, presented Hilltop research on Tuesday, February 20, 2024, to the Mississippi House Medicaid Committee. The research—a 2021 economic analysis of Medicaid expansion in Mississippi—was commissioned by the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization.

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For media inquiries, contact Marsha Willis.

Hilltop Executive Director Cynthia Woodcock has announced her retirement from UMBC effective May 1, 2024. Hilltop has been her professional home since 2004, and she has served as Hilltop’s Executive Director since 2013. UMBC Vice Provost Antonio Moreira will lead a national search for Hilltop’s next Executive Director. Alice Middleton, Hilltop’s Deputy Director, will serve as Interim Executive Director after Cynthia retires on May 1 and until her successor is on board.

For media inquiries, please contact Marsha Willis.

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The Hilltop Institute is proud to introduce the Price Transparency State Profiles, an innovative public resource offering centralized access to hospital pricing data as well as links to state laws on hospital price transparency. In response to the Hospital Price Transparency Rule, enacted as of January 1, 2021, requiring hospitals to disclose machine-readable data files of standard charges on their websites, Hilltop’s initiative aims to make hospital pricing data more accessible and user-friendly to researchers, policymakers, and the public.

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Hilltop Executive Director Cynthia Woodcock, MBA, and Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, provided comments in a feature story on STAT titled HCA Doctors Say Its Cost-Cutting is Endangering Appalachian Patients—A Warning for the Whole U.S. Health Care System. The article discusses the aftermath of HCA’s acquisition of Mission Hospital in Ashville, North Carolina. Woodcock and Henderson commented on issues related to Mission’s pricing for services since the acquisition.

Hilltop Policy Analyst Parker James, MPP, participated on a panel at the National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Director’s (NASTAD) National HIV and Hepatitis Technical Assistance Meeting on October 12, 2023, in Washington, DC. Titled Data Sharing between Surveillance and Medicaid Population Based Data Use, the panel presentation focused on overcoming obstacles in data sharing. James’ presentation focused on Maryland’s successful collaboration among HIV Surveillance, Medicaid, and Hilltop in sharing HIV viral suppression data to manage and improve the quality of care. The work is funded by the Health Resources and Service Administration’s Special Projects of National Significance Program, which supports the development of innovative models of HIV care and treatment.

In collaboration with the Maryland Department of Health (MDH), The Hilltop Institute has developed and released the Maryland Medicaid DataPort, a series of interactive Tableau® dashboards that display data from various Maryland Medicaid programs.

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Explore the DataPort.

In a new article in the Health Affairs Forefront series, titled One Year Later, Where Are The ‘Transparency In Coverage’ Compliance Studies? Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson and Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim posit that the reason there are no compliance studies is not because of lack of interest but because of the complexity of the landscape to which the regulation applies. Read the article.

Learn more about Hilltop’s work on price transparency.

Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, is the co-author of a new JAMA: Internal Medicine research article titled Comparison of Hospital Online Price and Telephone Price for Shoppable Services. In the study, the research team contacted 60 hospitals across 20 geographic areas of the country using simulated “secret shopper” patients and obtained telephonic pricing estimates for childbirth and brain MRIs. This research is among the first to assess whether newly available hospital price transparency data accurately captures true, underlying prices, and contributes to the national policy conversation about price transparency and hospital accountability.

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In a new article in the Health Affairs Forefront series, titled Transparency In Coverage: A New Tool For Promoting Provider Gender Equity? Hilltop Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim and Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson discuss whether novel and publicly available data generated from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ new rule for transparency in coverage could be used to promote provider gender equity. Read the article.

Learn more about Hilltop’s work on price transparency.  

Hilltop Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim, DVM, ScM, and Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, provided comments in a feature story produced by InvestigateTV titled The Price You Pay. The article and video discuss the difficulty for consumers and others to access and understand information about hospital prices that are now mandated to be published on hospitals’ websites.

Mouslim and Henderson are leading Hilltop’s ongoing research into hospital pricing and accountability. Read more about this work here.

Hilltop staff made four presentations at the 2023 AcademyHealth Annual Research meeting held June 24-27, in Seattle, Washington.

Principal Policy Analyst Dolapo Fakeye, PhD, gave a podium presentation, titled Novel Methodology Identifying Target Sites for School-Based Health Centers toward Closing Health and Educational Equity Gap. In it, he discussed his approach of evaluating disparities in academic, health, sociodemographic, and risk behavior domains for every school in Maryland to identify schools and communities that may benefit from establishing an SBHC. Fakeye also presented a poster titled The Utility of Data from Long-Term Care Assessments for Reducing Repeated Hospital Encounters among Medicare-Medicaid Dually Eligible Beneficiaries that described a Hilltop study to identify patient indicators from standardized long-term services and supports (LTSS) assessments strongly associated with the risk of rehospitalization among adults discharged after a prior hospital episode.

Senior Policy Analyst Katherine Holmes, MPS, presented a poster titled Vascular Screening and Amputation in Diabetic Medicaid Participants in Maryland that described the findings of her research study to understand the prevalence of diabetes, peripheral artery disease (PAD), and amputations in Maryland Medicaid participants and gain a greater understanding of the relationship between diagnostic screening for PAD, diabetes, and amputations for different risk factors.

Executive Director, Cynthia Woodcock, MBA, presented a poster for Data Scientist Leigh Goetschius, PhD, titled Effect of Extended Postpartum Medicaid Coverage on Primary Care Utilization in Maryland, that described the findings of Goetschius’ study to determine whether extended postpartum Medicaid coverage impacts utilization of primary care providers (PCPs) and/or reduce racial disparities in postpartum PCP utilization.

In a new Social Science and Medicine journal article, Hilltop data scientists Leigh Goetschius, PhD, Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Fei Han, PhD—with co-authors Dillon Mahmoudi, PhD, Chad Perman, MPP, Howard Haft, MD, and Ian Stockwell, PhD—present their findings on accounting for area-level social determinants of health in risk prediction.

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Hilltop Policy Analyst Roberto Millar, PhD, is one of four inaugural awardees of UMBC’s Center and Institute Departmentally Engaged Research (CIDER) grants. UMBC’s Office of Research Development established the CIDER seed awards to increase inter-unit collaboration, particularly between researchers whose appointments are not primarily in an academic department and researchers within academic units.

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