Building on decades of mission-driven partnerships to advance public well-being, Mathematica is proud to announce a series of new projects that will propel us on our journey to shaping an equitable and just world where evidence drives decisions for global impact.
As 2023 kicks into full gear, this new work reinforces our role as partners in the evidence community—providing timely, relevant, action-oriented information about the most pressing challenges for decision makers around the world. We are particularly excited about new and continuing partnerships that redouble our efforts to use evidence to drive equity, digital transformation, pandemic resilience, and climate action. We are also inspired by the interest more and more of our partners are taking in exploring the power of evidence-driven technical assistance, applying data and evidence in commercial health, and finding innovative solutions to the growing global climate crisis.
Shaping a more equitable and just world requires new kinds of evidence.
Our partners need better information on the root causes of inequities and how to address them. In the face of injustice, remaining objective does not mean remaining silent. Addressing inequality and injustice has always been important to Mathematica’s work, as we seek to understand how unequal policies, structures, and systems lead to unequal access to higher education, higher income, and other resources.
And as we center more of our projects on measuring and promoting equity, we’re excited about the opportunity to play a more direct role in understanding the causal forces that lead to inequality and in identifying mechanisms to undo that harm going forward.
- Partnering with the Center for Health Care Strategies, Mathematica will conduct a gap analysis of the availability and quality of HCBS statewide. Mathematica will work with the Department of Aging and the Department of Health Care Services to identify gaps in HCBS availability and develop a road map for the state to improve access to and the quality of these services.
- We continue to deepen our partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) through new projects. We’re a key learning partner in its effort to transform health and health care systems, with a focus on building equity into health systems across the nation. We’re also working to evaluate the Equity Learning Lab, a partnership of Learning for Action and Public Equity Group and RWJF, to build the capacity of their funded partners to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in their organizations and work.
- Building on our decades of work on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), we’re partnering with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to better understand how mobile technology can help make SNAP more accessible and equitable by enabling participants to redeem SNAP benefits using personal mobile devices at retailers.
- Through a new and exciting partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS), our team will design and conduct culturally responsive, equitable evaluations. These evaluations will enable the agency to better understand how its programs and services are implemented, and how they impact stakeholders. Together, we will evaluate how well CRS is meeting its critical mission to help communities prevent and respond to conflicts.
- To better understand the needs of people with disabilities, Mathematica is partnering with the Social Security Administration to survey new applicants to disability programs. This New Applicant Survey will enable the agency to assess how applicants fare during the application process and take note of the resources they use in their return-to-work attempts before applying for benefits.
- We’re continuing to partner with AmeriCorps to strengthen the learning culture of the agency and increase its capacity to generate and share evidence and evidence-building resources. This will enhance the capacity of AmeriCorps-supported programs, organizations, and members to make evidence-informed improvements that help communities tackle their toughest challenges.
Integrating technology and technical assistance that drive decisions to improve public well-being.
Technology continues to change the way we gather, analyze, and use evidence to drive decisions. These technological improvements, combined with the continued growth of evidence-based technical assistance, create partnering opportunities that leverage data-driven decision making in near-real time and at scale.
- We’re excited to work with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the CHILDREN (Child Welfare and Health Infrastructure for Linking and Data Analysis of Resources, Effectiveness, and Needs) project, a multi-disciplinary effort to link child welfare and Medicaid data and develop predictive analytics models to support implementation of the Family First Prevention Act. Our partnership will help state child welfare and Medicaid agencies improve delivery and oversight of services, monitor program spending, and conduct cross-program research and evaluation. By bringing together deep health and human services program expertise with data analytics, programming, and systems and technology experts, we’re helping HHS understand how linked cross-data systems and analytics can be used to improve equity for children and families in the child welfare system.
- In partnership with the Health Resources and Services Administration, Mathematica is leading the Rural Emergency Hospital (REH) Technical Assistance Center to ensure rural hospitals can make informed decisions whether REH is the best model of care for their communities and have the resources they need to successfully implement REH requirements.
- We continue to work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicaid and CHIP Learning Collaboratives to provide states with tools, resources, and information they need to operate high-performing health programs. As part of the project, we will also provide hands-on technical assistance for internal CMS projects to inform federal policies. These include policies such as those related to maximizing continuity of health care coverage for people whose eligibility will be redetermined by Medicaid as part of unwinding the Medicaid continuous enrollment requirement during the COVID-19 public health emergency.
- In partnership with the state of Vermont, we’re analyzing health care costs and use across the state and providing technical assistance to help Vermont explore new ways to finance health care, benchmark health care spending and avoidable utilization, and inform and create new payment models for sustainable and affordable health care. Our state experts are also fostering engagement with key community partners and providing technical assistance to support Vermont’s current All-Payer Model (APM) Agreement with CMS, development of future APM agreements, and Green Mountain Care Board accountable care organization oversight activities.
- We are continuing our partnership with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to help the agency and its Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) grantees learn more from their data. The project will modernize how PREP grantees submit performance measures data, using a secure, cloud-based portal. The project also includes the developing of a new online dashboard which will make performance measures easier to analyze and enable ACF and PREP grantees to learn more from their data.
- We are continuing our 15-year partnership with the U.S. Department of Education to help manage the What Works Clearinghouse™ (WWC). Mathematica will support WWC’s mission to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education by focusing on enhancement to its website, online tools for reviewers, expansion and strengthening of review standards, and creating accessible and relevant products for education stakeholders.
Modern borderless challenges require strong evidence that drives global impact.
To combat modern, borderless challenges like COVID-19, the global literacy crisis, and climate change, our partners need evidence that can inform policy and drive impact at a global scale. For decades, Mathematica has used its global footprint to put evidence in the hands of changemakers in countries around the world, when, where, and however they need it.
As we expand our global operations to bring evidence to bear on policies and programs in areas like education, energy, agriculture, and health, we do so with a growing number of partners from across the globe committed to global impact.
- Building on our partnership with the MasterCard Foundation, we’re working to support its overall impact strategy and examine the impact of its education programming in Africa. The education work brings together the Center for the Economies of Africa, Genesis Analytics, and Mathematica to deepen the foundation’s understanding of how African education systems change over time, and to develop and execute a comprehensive monitoring, evaluation, and learning framework to assess the foundation’s contribution to observed systems changes in its seven countries.
- In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Mathematica is working on a two-phase project to help improve yields and profits among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The first phase will look at the impact of the village-based advisor (VBA) program on the advisors themselves as well as the public and private systems in which they are embedded across five countries. The second phase will look at the impact of VBAs on farmer productivity, resilience, profit, and nutrition across Kenya, Mozambique, and Nigeria.
- We are collaborating with the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Center for Economics and Market Development team to put behavioral science at the center of USAID’s work and enhance the potency of its efforts. Our project will inform how the team integrates behavioral science into economic analysis tools and increases staff use of these tools.
- Based on the promise wastewater-based epidemiology has shown as a cost-effective, near-real-time data source for public health surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re helping the World Bank to develop a set of guidance documents that support governments in establishing wastewater monitoring programs in countries with low and middle incomes. The project will bring together a synthesis of existing literature along with a survey of various countries conducting wastewater surveillance to help expand use of this important tool for monitoring and improving public health.
As we continue to live out our mission to improve public well-being, we do so with the understanding that a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is fundamental to that mission. We do so knowing that the evolving nature of technology and cutting-edge methods will create new opportunities. And we do so recognizing that as our global footprint expands, so too do the opportunities to have a global impact. Working side by side with our partners in 2023 and beyond, that’s how we progress together.