Miriam Drapkin

Miriam Drapkin’s work focuses on supporting operations, analytics, and dissemination strategies for research and monitoring projects related to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), quality measurement, and health equity.

Since joining Mathematica in 2013, Drapkin has worked on a range of projects in the areas of Medicaid, CHIP, and state health. Currently, she directs a project to help the California Department of Managed Health Care collect and analyze the Health Equity and Quality Measure Set, stratified by race and ethnicity. She also leads public reporting for the Medicaid and CHIP unwinding effort and facilitates an expert panel convened to provide insight into promising practices gleaned from the COVID-19 pandemic to inform future efforts to provide pandemic-related and routine vaccinations. Past roles include directing the Medicaid and CHIP Scorecard project, supporting a Medicaid.gov-hosted website that showcases metrics and datapoints from more than 20 Medicaid agencies and groups. On the Quality Measure Development and Maintenance for CMS Programs project, she was the deputy project director and principal investigator of the team developing measures for dual-eligible Medicare–Medicaid enrollees. She served as deputy project director on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission Cost Trends project from 2015 to 2018, leading the development of analytic files built from the state’s All Payer Claims Database for multiple cross-agency applications, including measuring trends in health care spending for the Health Policy Commission.

On the Medicaid/CHIP Core Set Technical Assistance project, she coordinated several tasks under a contract to support state reporting of Medicaid/CHIP Core Set measures, including planning and hosting the Medicaid/CHIP track at the CMS Quality Conference, coordinating content development for the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services–sponsored Oral Health Technical Advisory Group and the Quality Technical Advisory Group, developing a series of training webinars and eLearning modules for states on quality improvement approaches, providing direct technical assistance to states that require assistance in calculating and reporting Core Set measures, and engaging stakeholders to select appropriate measures for Medicaid managed care plans through state Quality Rating System websites.

Before joining Mathematica, Drapkin led a team of analysts and programmers at the Center for Health Information and Analysis in Massachusetts, where she was responsible for liaising with other state agencies to produce quality and other health care performance analytics and promote a statewide quality strategy. In that role, she produced analyses and provided policy guidance to support the state Medicaid agency’s pay-for-performance program and public reports on health care quality, insurance premiums, and expenditures, and she managed the multistakeholder committee that was responsible for selecting a statewide quality measure set for providers to use in public reporting. She holds a M.P.H. in maternal and child health from Boston University.