HMA Insights – including our new podcast – puts the vast depth of HMA’s expertise at your fingertips, helping you stay informed about the latest healthcare trends and topics. Below, you can easily search based on your topic of interest to find useful information from our podcast, blogs, webinars, case studies, reports and more.
This blog was written by Laura Zaremba, Principal, HMA, and Robert Chouinard, VP Public Sector, HealthEC
What are we really talking about?
CMS published the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule in the Federal Register on March 4, 2019, the pre-publication text of the final rule was released on March 9, 2020, and the final rule was published in the Federal Register on May 1, 2020. The rules are effective as of January 2021 and will be enforced by July 2021.
This week, our In Focus comes from an HMA cross-cutting subject matter team, who have updated a core set of federal policy slides that analyzes recent federal policy actions following the Presidential and Congressional elections. It includes an analysis of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief legislation currently in development and recent CMS regulatory and administrative actions. Specifically, the analysis looks at:
This week, our In Focus section reviews preliminary 2020 Medicaid spending data collected in the annual CMS-64 Medicaid expenditure report. After submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), HMA received a draft version of the CMS-64 report that is based on preliminary estimates of Medicaid spending by state for federal fiscal year (FFY) 2020. Based on the preliminary estimates, Medicaid expenditures on medical services across all 50 states and six territories in FFY 2020 exceeded $649.4 billion, with over half of the total now flowing through Medicaid managed care programs. In addition, total Medicaid spending on administrative services was $29.7 billion, bringing total program expenditures to $679.1 billion.
HMA recently entered into a strategic partnership with The College for Behavioral Health Leadership (CBHL) for the 2021 calendar year.
This week, our In Focus section reviews recent Medicaid enrollment trends in capitated, risk-based managed care in 33 states.[1] Many state Medicaid agencies post monthly enrollment figures by health plan for their Medicaid managed care population to their websites. This data allows for the timeliest analysis of enrollment trends across states and managed care organizations. All 33 states highlighted in this review have released monthly Medicaid managed care enrollment data into the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2020. This report reflects the most recent data posted. HMA has made the following observations related to the enrollment data shown on Table 1 (below):
Rates of illness and death due to the COVID-19 pandemic have disproportionally impacted Americans who are Black, African American, Latinx, Native American, Asian, and other people of color as well as people with disabilities and those subsisting on poverty-level income. In response to this, AcademyHealth, in partnership with the Disability Policy Consortium (DPC), a Massachusetts-based cross-disability advocacy and action research organization, released a new report: Advancing Health Justice Using Medicaid Data: Key Lessons from Minnesota for the Nation. This report provides information on the importance of investing in data analysis to advance health justice in Medicaid populations. It further highlights the importance of partnering with communities most impacted by injustices that cause inequities in health outcomes.
Two new tools have been released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to help states and territories plan to transition back to regular operations after the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) ends.
In a report to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), HMA consultants Sarah Barth, Sharon Lewis and former research assistant Taylor Simmons, provided insight and review of Medicaid services for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (ID/DD).
This week, our In Focus section reviews a new model – Geographic Direct Contracting – introduced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center. The model will test whether a geographic-based approach to care delivery and value-based care can improve health and reduce costs for Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in the traditional fee-for-service program across an entire region. This model represents one of the most transformational models released by the Innovation Center. During the 6-year Geographic Direct Contracting model performance period the traditional Medicare program will be replaced by the Direct Contracting program in the 10 selected regions.
Jennifer Podulka penned a blog post for The Commonwealth Fund in conjunction with The SCAN Foundation, highlighting the legislative and regulatory changes made to Medicare in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was part of the HMA team who authored an Issue Brief and policy tracker earlier this year.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for greater health information technology interoperability, “digital” measures of healthcare quality and performance, and advanced value-based care systems has grown. In January 2021, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) publicly released its vision for healthcare quality measurement to the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) transition team. The paper, “The Future of Healthcare Quality,” focuses on four core areas, with three of them being specific to the evolution of a digital quality ecosystem:
This week’s In Focus highlights a recent HMA publication examining the drivers and barriers to Medicare Advantage plan adoption of newly available supplemental benefits intended to address unmet health and social needs. Unlike Traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans, which provide coverage for 40 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, may offer enrollees supplemental benefits which are not covered by the Medicare program. Until recently, the Medicare program has required that supplemental benefits be limited to those that are medical in nature. However, in recent years, Congress and CMS —through four different legislative and regulatory authorities — granted new flexibilities for Medicare Advantage plans to offer non-medical benefits that address social needs. Medicare Advantage plans may also now tailor supplemental benefits and make them available only to certain subpopulations based on chronic disease or health status.