It’s likely by now, nearly four weeks into 2020, that many of us already have given up on our New Year’s resolutions. Those well-intentioned goals to eat better, work out more and invest more time and energy into our physical and mental well-being already have been replaced by stresses at work and home that make these new habits seem impossible to form.

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Fact: victims of human trafficking are seen in our hospitals and other sites of care every day. Your caregivers are on the front lines of this crisis. Studies show with certainty that survivors of trafficking are likely to have contact with the health care system during their abuse.

Maryland hospitals have delivered wins under the All-Payer Model (2014-18) and the new Total Cost of Care Model contract with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). In addition to managing spending, we’ve grown savings while decreasing cumulative and year-to-date spending growth for Medicare beneficiaries.

Hospitals today face unprecedented challenges, seemingly from all sides. As we aim for better health for Marylanders, we encounter obstacles to building our workforce, upgrading our facilities, and strengthening our bonds with the communities we serve.

As we enter the holiday time and reflect on the year now ending, it’s striking how many challenges the Maryland hospital field faced and what you’ve accomplished. The new Total Cost of Care Model launched and you blew through the first year’s savings target. You built upon quality achievements from the previous model of lower readmissions and 30-day mortality.

As hospitals across the country face criticism for long emergency department wait times, the dearth of community-based behavioral health resources must be flagged as a significant cause. Many of your hospitals contend with behavioral health patients who simply have nowhere else to go—both at onset of an episode and when ready for discharge—due to lack of capacity in more appropriate care settings.

Without fanfare, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) posted the final evaluation of the Maryland All-Payer Model. Overall the findings suggest the Model works. One good sign: CMMI’s project leader for Maryland praised the Model on social media last week, saying, “What I’m most impressed with is the decrease in potentially avoidable hospitalizations.”

The other day we got a preview of the headwinds the hospital field can expect to face when the Maryland General Assembly session opens in seven weeks. MHA participated in a Senate committee briefing on facility fees. At the briefing, MHA highlighted our field’s proactive effort to improve transparency for patients.

You may have watched in recent weeks as California residents fled their homes while flames from wildfires inched closer and hospitals faced the daunting task of swiftly evacuating all their patients.

Like many of you, I spent much of October staying up past my bedtime, bingeing on ice cream, and shouting at the TV—all while watching the Washington Nationals in inning after inning of nail-biting baseball. Fortunately, the elevated stress paid off. And, even if they hadn’t won the final game, it would’ve been worth it.

Maryland Senate President Mike Miller’s recent announcement that he will step down from the leadership position he held for 33 years marks a seismic change for the chamber. Though Miller intends to remain a senator, his absence at the dais will be felt in Annapolis.

Recently the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) released a new Diabetes Action Plan that aims to create conditions conducive to better health and reduce the impact of diabetes on Marylanders. MDH understands the plan will require an “all in” effort from a wide variety of actors, including state and local policymakers, payers, employers, school boards and administrators, community groups and others.

A groundswell of support is forming at the state and national levels to make hospital billing more understandable and transparent for our patients. Feeding that push are nearly daily headlines about patients who received bills that exceeded their expectations, people who were confused after receiving two bills for what looked like the same service, and hospitals’ efforts, legitimate as they may be, to collect on unpaid debts.

To best position Maryland hospitals and health systems for the future, partnering with state and local agencies is key. To that end, MHA participates in a group Secretary of Health Robert Neall convenes to help ensure the Maryland Model reaches its aims of better care and better health.

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.

Every day thousands of committed health care professionals come to work in your hospitals to ensure we deliver the highest quality care to patients. That puts you among the state’s largest employers — directly employing 107,000 people, supporting 113,000 related jobs, and contributing more than $30 billion each year to our state’s economy.

MHA recently returned from the Maryland Association of Counties conference, where our team met with state and local leaders, lawmakers, policymakers and influencers to advocate and better position us as we head into the 2020 legislative session.