The Health Services Cost Review Commission (HSCRC) granted Maryland’s hospitals their largest global budget increase in recent memory last week — a 3.59% increase in total revenue (3.28% per capita) for fiscal year 2020.

The average hospital is expected to receive about 3.3% growth in total regulated revenue — or 3% per capita.

I and MHA colleagues Brett McCone and Mike Robbins advocated with HSCRC for an additional 0.33% for global budgets to aid the expansion of your care transformation efforts.

We underscored the hospital field’s success in the All-Payer Model — which resulted in $273 million in Medicare total cost of care savings in 2018 alone — and asked that hospitals receive additional funding to augment your investments in communities intended to advance the health of all Marylanders.

We also noted, as featured in MHA Insight, that commercial payers are benefiting from hospitals’ successes but do not appear to be passing the savings through to consumers.

The approved update offers a measure of stability for fiscal year 2020. Yet, hospitals must continue to build upon the progress you’ve made so far, all while limiting growth in statewide total cost of care and curbing avoidable utilization.