Olivia Kenney

Olivia Kenney is an expert in qualitative evaluation, and her interests lie at the intersection of policy, evidence, and health equity. She focuses primarily on learning and evaluation support for health foundations.

In her learning and evaluation work, Kenney helps design, develop tools for, collect data for, analyze, and report on evaluations of projects that take innovative approaches to transforming health care systems by integrating health equity and community voices. Some focus areas of her evaluation work include addressing systemic racism in outreach and enrollment activities for the Affordable Care Act Marketplace, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program; the strategy and equity implications of general operating support for foundations and their grantees; and the effectiveness of mechanisms for holding health system accountable for growth in health care costs.

Before joining Mathematica, Kenney worked as an evaluation coordinator at the Colorado School of Public Health and as a qualitative analyst studying public comments submitted about proposed rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. She first became interested in health systems while working as a medical billing specialist for a health care provider in Boulder, Colorado. She later interned at the Boulder County Public Health department, completing a capstone project on the role that public health departments can play in addressing housing access as a social determinant of health.

Kenney has an M.P.H. from the Colorado School of Public Health and a B.A. in international studies from George Washington University.