Health Economics Program
Select Implementation Updates

HEP issued a request for proposal (RFP) — which closed March 4 — to conduct a legislative study of administrative spending associated with health insurance coverage and the delivery of health care services in Minnesota. The study will identify strategies to reduce unproductive administrative expenditures.

Check back for more information.

One of the new initiatives for the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) is to establish a Center for Health Care Affordability (the center); Minnesota Statutes, chapter 70, article 16

For background on the importance of creating the Center, please review Addressing Our Growing Health Care Costs Infographic (PDF).

For more information about the center, visit the Center for Health Care Affordability website.

HEP released a request for proposal (RFP) on low-value services that closed on February 6. The study will estimate the volume and change over time of low-value care in Minnesota and include data inventory and key informant interviews with experts in health care finance, health economics, and health care management or administration.

Utilization review organizations (UROs) must report prior authorization requests from the previous year — including approvals and denials — annually beginning September 2025 (Minnesota Statues, section 62M.19). MDH will publish the reporting guidance for utilization review organizations in the summer of 2025.

For more information, visit MDH's Utilization Review Organization Reporting webpage.

Legislation passed in 2022 (Minnesota Statutes, section 144,551, subdivision 1a) allows hospitals, without a public interest review or statutory expectation under certain conditions, to add mental health beds or to construct a new mental health hospital to the hospital moratorium. MDH is tasked with monitoring new beds or hospitals and collecting data.

Visit the Mental Health Bed Monitoring webpage for more information.

In order to get a more complete picture of health care spending in Minnesota—including utilization and spending on primary care—the Minnesota Legislature directed MDH to prepare a legislative report on health care spending payment models. This report will have particular focus on valued-based care models and primary care spending (Minnesota Statutes, chapter 70, article 2, section 41).

To inform the report, MDH completed an environmental scan on nonclaims-based payment reporting strategies and categories, interviewed health plans, and piloted data collection. Findings from the study, to be published in 2025, will inform annual collection of nonclaims-based payment data from health plans.