Several health policy experts from UMass Medical School’s Commonwealth Medicine division will present at the annual Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference. A range of presentations will focus on how state collaborations can support the mission of Medicaid in an era of health reform and transformation.
Key presentations will highlight how reuse and sharing on technology projects can aid development of complex health insurance marketplaces and Medicaid eligibility systems. Experts will also address how state-based exchanges can develop performance metrics to evaluate the systems being built to expand access to health insurance for millions of Americans under the Accountable Care Act.
The conference, at the Charleston Area Convention Center in North Charleston, S.C., will also highlight Commonwealth Medicine’s expertise in providing Medicaid agencies with program and technical support, including integrated eligibility systems.
Chief Health Policy Strategist Jay Himmelstein, MD, MPH, and Scott Keays, MPH, both within Commonwealth Medicine's Center for Health Policy and Research, will speak during two sessions at the conference.
Their first presentation will be during the "Health Reform Analytics & Data – It’s all about the Data" session on Sept. 10. "Developing and Reporting Performance Metrics for Exchange and Medicaid Systems under Healthcare Reform" will highlight how Massachusetts developed initiatives to report on health insurance exchange performance and share potential data sources to monitor and report on the progress of health reform initiatives. Himmelstein and Keays will be joined by Natasha Dolgin, an MD/PhD student at UMass Medical School.
Himmelstein and Keays will present "Making the Most of Reusability: How Collaboration among States Can Help Facilitate Planning and Implementing the Infrastructure for Health Insurance Exchanges under the Affordable Care Act" on Sept. 11. The "State-Based Marketplace and Medicaid Information Technology (IT) System Contracts Update" will feature national trends in exchange and Medicaid IT development and discuss the potential for states to share knowledge, reuse components and accelerate development. They will be joined by Jessica Kahn, MPH, acting director of the Division of State Systems within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
A poster presentation, "Analyzing Medicaid Waiver Data," is scheduled for Sept. 9. Rick Perro, senior director of Data Management Services for UHealthSolutions, and Peter J. Tiernan, director of administration and finance for the Massachusetts Department of Elder Affairs, will focus on determining the value of home and community based services to an elderly population and evaluating service plans and costs using consumer characteristics.
