Your hospitals compose the Maryland Hospital Association, and in turn, the association is the hospitals. Your needs, concerns and direction drive our work. And, thus MHA’s success is yours.

To best support your needs, MHA must constantly balance the demand to address current issues while anticipating opportunities and challenges to come. Last Thursday and Friday, MHA’s Executive Committee of the Board met to ponder the issues shaping health care in Maryland over the next decade.

Last week AHA held a biennial national meeting of all nine Regional Policy Boards. CMS Administrator Seema Verma spoke on the final day, delivering strong words on the federal government’s push toward value-based payment. “We must move past the status quo, and past a fee-for-service payments to a system in which we’re paying providers to keep people healthy, reduce costs and deliver better outcomes,” she noted.

A bipartisan effort to address surprise medical bills is expected to be among lawmakers’ top priorities when Congress returns this week from August recess. MHA is engaged on the issue —including the House’s No Surprises Act and Senate’s Lower Health Care Cost Act—and has been since it arose months ago.