Mary Laschober

Throughout her career, Mary Laschober has studied the Medicare population, particularly physician and hospital alternative payment methods, low-income beneficiaries, and the quality and cost performance of providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries.

Laschober’s recent work on alternative payment approaches includes directing a multiyear project as the payment reconciliation contractor for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service’s Bundled Payment for Care Improvement initiative, under which four models of care are being tested as alternatives to the current fee-for-service payment system. Mathematica provides technical assistance to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on the development of episode bundle baseline, target, and performance period pricing methodologies; develops and implements methods for reconciling payment to initiative awardees; and develops methods for analyzing post-episode spending by initiative awardees. Laschober also directed a multiyear project to understand analytic and policy issues related to measuring and reporting physician-driven costs of care relating to quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries. In addition, she helped expand physician quality measures for the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, 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 a Medicare performance monitoring system and directed tasks to evaluate hospital quality, including analysis of hospital survey data and consumer testing of potential new Hospital Compare quality measures.

Laschober 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 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. Her experience as senior manager at BearingPoint involved directing projects to identify information needs and communication strategies for reaching Medicare beneficiaries, Medicaid- and Children’s Health Insurance Program-eligible people, and dually eligible Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries.

Laschober publishes in peer-reviewed journals such as Health Affairs 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.