SIM Evaluation

After two years of ambitious work led by Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to achieve the Triple Aim of improved health, improved patient care experience, and lower healthcare costs, it’s time to see what we’ve accomplished.

The State Innovation Model (SIM) evaluation is a comprehensive effort, spearheaded by The Lewin Group, to measure the impact of SIM-sponsored programs being conducted by organizations throughout Maine.  There has been work done to develop new payment models that incentivize health outcomes instead of services rendered; efforts to establish new healthcare delivery systems that better integrate and coordinate care for patients; and infrastructure changes designed to put data into the hands of patients and providers to help them make better healthcare decisions. State Innovation Model work represents the largest collective healthcare transformation effort in the state’s history, and understanding the impact of this effort will not only help those engaged in the State Innovation Model initiative to gauge their success to date, but it will also help to set future performance targets for SIM projects.

As part of the SIM evaluation, The Lewin Group has created a dashboard that shows progress on core metrics that have been selected by the SIM Steering Committee, a multi-stakeholder group that has been guiding SIM work from the beginning.  The dashboard is broken out by MaineCare, Medicare, and commercial patients, and it includes metrics on things like non-emergent emergency department use, use of imaging studies for low back pain treatment, and developmental screenings for children in the first three years of life.  Each metric shows whether the measure has moved toward or lost sight of its goal.