Commentary looks at first-year results from Maryland All-Payer Model

A commentary in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine looks at preliminary first-year results from the Maryland All-Payer Model, launched last year by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and state to modernize Maryland’s unique all-payer rate-setting system for hospital services. “Although a formal evaluation using a propensity scoring method with matched comparison hospitals and market areas is still underway, these preliminary results are promising,” wrote representatives from CMS, Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Among other findings, Maryland reduced per-capita hospital costs by 1.08% and the rate of potentially preventable conditions by 26.3%, they said. Maryland Hospital Association President & CEO Carmela Coyle notes in a piece in Health Affairs that while the quality and financial gains in the first year are encouraging, especially the $116 million of Medicare savings achieved, there is much hard work to be done to ensure the model is sustainable over the long term.