Senior Director of Research and Analytics/Chief Data Scientist Ian Stockwell, PhD, and Principal Data Scientists Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Fei Han, PhD were co-authors of this article published in Health Services Research (Volume 57, Issue 1).
Enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) gave states the option to expand their Medicaid programs by extending eligibility to almost all adults under age 65 with income below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL). As of December 2021, Mississippi was 1 of 12 states that has not expanded its Medicaid program. In order to provide state policymakers with the latest available evidence on the potential impact of Medicaid expansion, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy commissioned The Hilltop Institute to conduct a study on the likely effects of Medicaid expansion on Mississippi’s Medicaid program, state budget, wider economy, and providers. This report provides a summary of the study findings. A more detailed technical report is also available.
Enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) gave states the option to expand their Medicaid programs by extending eligibility to almost all adults under age 65 with income below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL). As of December 2021, Mississippi was 1 of 12 states that has not expanded its Medicaid program. In order to provide state policymakers with the latest available evidence on the potential impact of Medicaid expansion, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy commissioned The Hilltop Institute to conduct a study on the likely effects of Medicaid expansion on Mississippi’s Medicaid program, state budget, wider economy, and providers. This technical report presents the findings of this study in full detail. A summary report is also available.
This annual report, written for the UMBC community, provides an overview of key projects and staff accomplishments for FYs 2020 and 2021.
Emergency department (ED) care coordination plays an important role in facilitating care transitions across settings. This study addresses ED care coordination processes and their perceived effectiveness in Maryland hospitals, which face strong incentives to reduce hospital-based care through global budgets.
Hilltop Executive Director Cynthia Woodcock was co-author of this article published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
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 by calendar year (CY) 2018. Over 20 years after its launch, HealthChoice covered close to 90 percent of the state’s Medicaid and Maryland Children’s Health Program (MCHP) populations.
The Hilltop Institute, on behalf of the Maryland Department of Health (the Department), evaluates the program annually; this evaluation covers the period from CY 2015 through CY 2019.
As of the writing of this review, Mississippi was 1 of 12 states to have not expanded its Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Recent discussion on a possible expansion within the state, however, has demonstrated the need for timely, non-partisan research on this topic. To that end, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy contracted with The Hilltop Institute to conduct a study of the economic impact of a (hypothetical) Medicaid expansion, with a focus on Mississippi’s Medicaid program, state budget, and provider landscape. As part of the development of the analytic plan for the study, Hilltop conducted this literature review in order to document relevant findings that can help inform the study design.
Healthcare programs such as Medicaid provide crucial services to vulnerable populations but, due to limited resources, many of the individuals who need these services the most languish on waiting lists. Survival models can potentially improve this situation by predicting individuals’ levels of need, which can then be used to prioritize the waiting lists. Providing care to those in need can prevent institutionalization for those individuals, which both improves quality of life and reduces overall costs. While the benefits of such an approach are clear, care must be taken to ensure that the prioritization process is fair, and does not reinforce harmful systemic bias. In this study, we develop multiple fairness definitions and corresponding fair learning algorithms for survival models to ensure equitable allocation of healthcare resources. We demonstrate the utility of our methods in terms of fairness and predictive accuracy on three publicly available survival data sets.
Senior Director of Research and Analytics/Chief Data Scientist Ian Stockwell, PhD co-authored this article published in proceedings of the 2021 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) International Conference on Data Mining.
As directed by the 2020 Joint Chairmen’s Report from the Maryland General Assembly, Hilltop, in consultation with the Maryland Department of Health, examined Maryland’s Home and Community-Based Options Waiver (CO Waiver), established in 2014 through a merger of the Waiver for Older Adults and the Living at Home Waiver. To address the Joint Chairmen’s request, Hilltop conducted this five-part study.
This report describes the services The Hilltop Institute provided to the Maryland Department of Health (the Department) under the Master Agreement between Hilltop and the Department. The report covers fiscal year (FY) 2020 (July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2020). Hilltop’s interdisciplinary staff provided a wide range of services, including: Medicaid program development and policy analysis; HealthChoice program support, evaluation, and financial analysis; long-term services and supports program development, policy analysis, and financial analytics; and data management and web-accessible database development.