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Mary A. Laschober
Senior Researcher
Mary Laschober is a senior health researcher who focuses on Medicare policy. Throughout her career, she has conducted research on the Medicare population in general, on low-income Medicare beneficiaries in particular, and on the quality and cost performance of providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries.
Laschober’s recent work on health resource use, cost, and quality indicators for physicians treating Medicare beneficiaries includes directing a four-year project to support the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Agency’s continuing effort to understand the analytic and policy issues related to measuring and reporting physician-driven costs of care, in relation to the quality of clinical care provided to Medicare beneficiaries. Mathematica assists CMS with identifying fair, actionable, and meaningful measures of resource use and quality for both individual physicians and physician practices, with the ultimate goal of using composite scores of resource use and quality to implement the value-based payment modifier required by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and to provide confidential reports to physicians on their performance in order to encourage more efficient medical practice.
Laschober also assisted CMS with expanding physician quality measures for its Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), leading work to devise program validation strategies and provide real-time program monitoring. She employed Medicare claims data to lead the construction of historical process, outcomes, and utilization performance indicators for CMS’ Medicare Health Support Program performance monitoring system. She directed tasks to evaluate the Hospital Quality Alliance initiative for CMS, including analysis of hospital survey data and consumer testing of potential new Hospital Compare quality measures. She also has considerable experience with the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), dating back nearly to the start of the survey. As senior study director at Westat, she was substantially involved in the development of charge and payment imputation methods, used MCBS data to conduct health policy analyses, and designed and produced the first MCBS data compendia materials.
Laschober’s qualitative research on the Medicare program includes leading a CMS study on national, state, and local efforts to educate and enroll low-income beneficiaries in the first years of the Low-Income Subsidy Part D program, as well as identify best practices for increasing program enrollment. Her prior work as senior manager at BearingPoint involved directing research projects to identify information needs and communication strategies for reaching Medicare beneficiaries, Medicaid- and CHIP-eligible individuals, and dually eligible Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries. She directed a 10-state case study of American Indian/Alaska Native barriers to enrollment in the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP programs.
Laschober publishes in peer-reviewed journals, including Health Affairs and the Health Care Financing Review and presents at professional conferences that include AcademyHealth and the American Public Health Association. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Staff Profile
- Areas of Expertise
- Key Projects
- Professional Activities
- Publications
- Medicare policy
- Health resource use, cost, and quality indicators for Medicare beneficiaries
- Physician quality measures
- Development of Resource Use Reports for Medicare Fee-for-Service Claims
- Best Practices for Enrolling Low-Income Beneficiaries into the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Program
- Develop Strategies for Validation Methodology, Cost Estimates, and Impact on Underserved Area
- "What Physicians Think About Resource Use Reports." Chicago, IL: AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (June 2009)
- "Options for Validating Claims-Based Ambulatory Care Quality Data for Value-Based Purchasing.” Orlando, FL: AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (June 2007)
- “Pay for Performance: Are Hospitals Ready and Willing? (2005 Survey of Hospital Executives).” Boston, MA: American Public Health Association Annual Meeting (November 2006)
- "Final Evaluation Report: Best Practices for Enrolling Low-Income Beneficiaries into the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Program" (February 2009)
- "Hospital Response to Public Reporting of Quality Indicators." Health Care Financing Review (spring 2007)