On April 10, 2024, Hilltop Deputy Director Alice Middleton was one of three speakers at a session of the University of Baltimore-sponsored Rosenberg Dialogue Series, titled Fixing Unintended Pandemic Medicaid Policy Consequences: Lessons Learned and Insurance Coverage Implications for Recipients. In the session, speakers discussed the national context and state variations in qualifying disenrolled persons for coverage, Maryland Medicaid experiences with this policy complication for continuous enrollment, and generating data and information for evidence-based decisions.
As Mississippi is actively considering expanding its Medicaid program, Hilltop created this informational brief to capture key facts regarding Medicaid policy options as they apply to a potential Medicaid expansion in Mississippi.
As Mississippi is actively considering expanding its Medicaid program, Hilltop created this informational brief to capture key facts regarding Medicaid work requirements as they apply to a potential Medicaid expansion in Mississippi.
Medicaid enrollments typically reflect programmatic factors (such as eligibility thresholds or outreach efforts) and underlying economic factors (such as recessions). As Mississippi is actively considering expanding its Medicaid program, The Hilltop Institute assembled publicly available Medicaid enrollment trend data from another state (Louisiana) to show its expansion enrollment over time.
Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Executive Director Cynthia Woodcock, MBA, presented Hilltop research 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.
How well do US hospitals’ online prices posted for shoppable services correlate with their prices for the same service obtained via the telephone? In this cross-sectional study of 60 US hospitals, online and phone cash prices were poorly correlated within a given hospital for vaginal childbirth. These findings suggest that at US hospitals, price estimates for shoppable services posted online correlate poorly with prices obtained via phone; these findings suggest that patients will continue to face barriers to comparison shopping.
In 1997, Maryland implemented HealthChoice—a statewide mandatory Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) managed care program—under authority of a waiver through §1115 of the Social Security Act. The provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that went into effect in 2014 marked another milestone by extending quality coverage to many more Marylanders with low income. Over 20 years after its launch, HealthChoice covers close to 90% of the state’s Medicaid and Maryland Children’s Health Program (MCHP) populations. Since the inception of HealthChoice, the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) has requested and received seven §1115 waiver renewals.
The Hilltop Institute, on behalf of MDH, evaluates the program annually; this evaluation covers the period from CY 2017 through CY 2021.
Principal Policy Analyst Dolapo Fakeye, PhD, gave this podium presentation at the 2023 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (ARM) held June 24-27, 2023, in Seattle.
The Hilltop Pre- Models are risk prediction models developed by The Hilltop Institute at UMBC that use a variety of risk factors derived from Medicare claims data to estimate the event risk that a given patient incurs a given outcome in the near future. As of November 2022, there are three such prediction models in production for the Maryland Primary Care Program (MDPCP) population: the Hilltop Pre-AH Model™, which generates the “Avoidable Hospitalizations (PreAH)” scores; the Hilltop Pre-DC Model™, which generates the “Severe Diabetes Complications (Pre-DC)” scores; and the Hilltop Pre-HE Model™, which generates the “Hospice Eligibility and Advanced Care Planning (Pre-HE)” scores. These risk scores are displayed in the MDPCP Prediction Tools area on Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP).
The Hilltop Pre-HE Model™—which generates the rankings for the Hospice Eligibility and Advanced Care Planning (Pre-HE) scores—is designed to support proactive advanced care planning discussions by estimating a patient’s risk of eligibility for hospice. The Pre-HE Model provides risk scores and reasons for risk for all attributed beneficiaries of Maryland Primary Care Program (MDPCP) practices every month in order to identify patients that are potentially appropriate for hospice care and to provide care teams with information that can guide the sensitive and difficult conversations about end-of-life care with patients and their families.