News & Bulletins Archive
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In their new study, Assessing Compliance with Hospital Price Transparency over Time, Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim, DVM, ScM, use a nationwide data set of 4,834 hospitals to examine compliance with hospital price transparency regulations over time. They also assess the extent to which certain factors are associated with improving compliance.
Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim, DVM, ScM, have been awarded a grant from Arnold Ventures to fund research using newly available payer price transparency files. These price transparency files have been public since July 1, 2022, and are the result of federal regulation mandating that all health insurers and payers publicly post machine-readable data files containing the negotiated rates for all providers with which they contract, as well as all services those providers provide.
The Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) has recently published several journal articles discussing the findings of its multi-state research project titled Examining the Quality of Opioid Use Disorder Treatment in a Medicaid Research Network that assessed opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment quality and outcomes in Medicaid. The purpose of the assessment is to inform policy decisions on coverage and payment for Medicaid evidence-based OUD treatments. Hilltop Senior Policy Analyst Shamis Mohamoud, MA, is Hilltop’s lead analyst on the project and is a co-author of the publications.
Two recently released podcasts—one in Healthcare Upside/Down and one in UMBC’s Retrieving the Social Sciences series—feature Hilltop researchers Morgan Henderson and Morgane Mouslim and their work on hospital pricing.
Hilltop’s newly funded National Science Foundation (NSF) project on hospital pricing behavior is featured in a new article by State of Reform, an organization focused on conversations that bridge the gap between health care and the policy that governs it.
A new article from UMBC showcases the many ways Hilltop is using complex data analytics to advance the health and wellbeing of people and communities. Titled The Hilltop Institute at UMBC revolutionizes data analytics to advance health and wellbeing, the article discusses some of Hilltop’s cutting-edge projects, analytic tools, and collaborative work style that serve to make it one the country’s leading public university-based health policy research centers.
Hilltop Principal Data Scientist Morgan Henderson, PhD, and Policy Analyst Morgane Mouslim, DVM, ScM, have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project titled Provider Pricing Behavior and Health Policy.