Cara Stepanczuk

Cara Stepanczuk uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to evaluate Medicaid long-term services and supports (LTSS), health care delivery reform, and community-based care management programs. Stepanczuk has extensive experience using federal and state Medicaid enrollment and claims data, CMS-64 financial data, and program-specific data. They specialize in developing data analytics products to shed light on complex topics and support decision making.

Stepanczuk leads the data analytics task for the LTSS Expenditures Reports project, which produces LTSS user counts, characteristics, and expenditures based on the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System Analytic Files (TAF). In addition, Stepanczuk directs the Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services: Differences in Spending and Utilization project for the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission. This project draws on the updated home and community-based services taxonomy to compare user counts and expenditures by delivery system, Medicaid authority, and LTSS user characteristics.

Stepanczuk helped produce dynamic quarterly reports with performance-monitoring measures for MassHealth’s Community Partners Program, which provides care management and coordination for Medicaid beneficiaries with complex needs for behavioral health care or LTSS. Stepanczuk also helped lead the automation of the TAF data quality assessments that underlie DQ Atlas for the Medicaid and CHIP Business Information Solutions initiative. Furthermore, they led an analysis to determine how closely TAF expenditures align with CMS-64 expenditures.

Before joining Mathematica, Stepanczuk was a research associate for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. They hold an M.P.A. from Princeton University.