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Steenland will discuss the effect of South Carolina’s 2012 Medicaid policy change to begin providing reimbursement for immediate postpartum long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) separate from the global labor and delivery payment. Her research has shown that this Medicaid payment policy change can be an effective policy option to increase immediate postpartum LARC initiation and increase birth spacing among young women. For her study, Steenland created a dataset that included inpatient Medicaid claims for all Medicaid-covered births linked to Medicaid outpatient claims for contraception in the eight weeks after delivery between 2010 and 2017. She then tested whether Medicaid’s policy affected trends in immediate postpartum LARC provision, provision of other forms of inpatient and outpatient postpartum contraception, and short birth intervals (equal to or less than 27 months). Her results indicate that the policy change increased the likelihood of immediate postpartum LARC provision to both teens and adults and decreased the probably of subsequent childbirth within 18 months of delivery among teens. The policy also decreased postpartum sterilization, and to a lesser degree, contraceptive injectable and pill use for adult women.

Steenland is a health scientist with training in epidemiology, health economics, econometrics, and impact evaluation. Her research uses econometric methods to evaluate maternal and reproductive health programs and policies in sub-Saharan Africa and in the United States. Her previous research has tested the impact of policy changes in patient out-of-pocket costs, provider payments, and service organization on health care provision and utilization. She holds a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan and a Doctor of Science in Global Health and Population from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Before joining Brown, Steenland worked on an evaluation of a Medicaid payment policy change in South Carolina to increase provision of long-acting reversible contraception to postpartum women. She also evaluated a pilot scheduling system to reduce health facility waiting time for antenatal care in Mozambique and evaluated the impact of performance-based health service financing in Burkina Faso and Cameroon. As a postdoctoral fellow at Brown, Steenland plans to work on a large-scale impact evaluation of appointment scheduling for patients seeking HIV treatment in Mozambique.