The Human and Economic Toll of Treatment-Resistant Depression

Mark Desmarais — Principal

Mark Desmarais specializes in Medicare and Medicaid policy consulting with a focus on large dataset analysis, including all Medicare datasets available to the private sector. He is a front-to-back problem solver for clients designing data analysis who strives to answer questions and anticipate future needs. Mark has extensive experience analyzing Medicare and other health datasets and applying the results in solving public policy challenges and supporting policy advocacy in the regulatory and legislative arena. Before joining HMA, Mark was a partner at The Moran Company, now an HMA Company. He manages project teams tackling policy issues across the healthcare spectrum. He has extensive experience helping pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers as they navigate the regulations surrounding the Outpatient and Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems. He has performed in-depth modeling of issues related to the 340B program as well. In addition, Mark has vast experience with regulatory issues in ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis facilities, and skilled nursing facilities. He has led modeling of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) scoring proposals advanced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in implementing the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). In addition, Mark has analyzed client data warehouses to inform public policymaking on issues where publicly available datasets lacked essential information. He manages client relationships and deliverables, leads small project teams, and trains analysts in programming, policy context, and data analysis. His clients have included pharmaceutical, biotech, and device manufacturers, trade associations, hospitals, and physician specialty societies. Mark graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He has more than 10 years of SAS® programming experience with large healthcare datasets.