Hilltop Presents at AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (ARM)

The Hilltop Institute had a visible presence at this year’s AcademyHealth ARM, held June 11-14 in Seattle, Washington.

On June 11, Hilltop and the Department of Health Management and Policy at Saint Louis University co-sponsored a Community Benefit preconference. Hilltop Hospital Community Benefit Program Director Donna Folkemer, MA, spoke about current policy challenges for states, discussing issues for states to help inform the interpretation and implementation of Section 9007 of the Affordable Care Act, which is the subject of the program’s second issue brief, Hospital Community Benefits after the ACA: Building on State Experience. To view the presentation, clickhere.

On June 12, Hilltop Senior Policy Analyst Karen E. Johnson, MS, gave a poster presentation entitled Using Propensity Score Matching Techniques to Establish Treatment/Control Groups to Assess Medicare and Medicaid Service Use, which was also authored by Hilltop Director of Special Research and Development Anthony M. Tucker, PhD, and UMBC Assistant Professor Yi  Huang, PhD. The poster described the use of a propensity score matching methodology to identify comparison groups among Medicare-Medicaid beneficiaries who received Medicaid-paid long-term services and supports (LTSS) via home and community-based (HCBS) waivers versus those who did not receive LTSS. This matching technique was used to establish comparable treatment/control pairs for subsequent analysis of cross-payer effects of providing Medicaid-paid LTSS on Medicare acute care resource use, and could be used more generally to strengthen policy analyses that are based on observational and/or administrative data.

On June 12, Hilltop Policy Analyst Laura Spicer gave a presentation at a session on Addressing Cost and Affordability in Public Programs: Implications for the Affordable Care Act. Her presentation, entitled Evaluating Small Group Employer Participation in New Mexico’s SCI Program, discussed findings from a Hilltop study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Access Reform Evaluation (SHARE) initiative. The study identified factors associated with small group employer participation in New Mexico’s State Coverage Insurance (SCI) program.

On June 14, Hilltop Director of Medicaid Policy Studies David Idala, MA, gave a presentation at a session on outreach and enrollment that examined how states could reach newly eligible populations under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). His presentation, entitled Maryland’s Kids First Act: The Use of Tax Forms to Identify Medicaid/CHIP-Eligible Children, discussed the use of state income tax forms to identify children who are eligible for, but not enrolled in, Medicaid, and the lessons learned so far from the Maryland Kids First outreach initiative that could help states as they implement the ACA.

Finally, Hilltop Director of Long-Term Services and Supports Cynthia H. Woodcock, MBA, and Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Deputy Secretary of Finance and former Hilltop Executive Director Charles J. Milligan, Jr., JD, MPH, presented the keynote address, Rebalancing Long-Term Services and Supports: Progress to Date and a Research Agenda for the Future, at this year’s Long-Term Care Colloquium on June 14. Woodcock and Milligan presented highlights from their commissioned paper focusing on the success, to date, of rebalancing long-term care toward community settings and the implications of provisions in the Affordable Care Act for future rebalancing efforts.

June 20, 2011