Meaghan is a senior research scientist at NORC with 12 years of experience in health policy evaluation with a focus on care access and quality for children’s youth and families served by Medicaid, and social determinants of health. 

In her work, she has led systematic evidence and data reviews on a range of topics for HRSA, SAMHSA, ASPE, CMS, and ACF, recently completing evidence reviews for the CMS Office of Minority Health on evidence-based practices for engaging historically underserved communities in behavioral health treatment; for SAMHSA, examining federal agency’s efforts to define and operational trauma exposure and trauma-informed care among children, youth and families; and a portfolio assessment for ASPE of cross-HHS agency investment in overdose prevention-related activities in light of the cross-agency HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy.

She currently directs a community-based participatory research study evaluating inequities in home and community-based service (HCBS) access for Minnesota Medicaid and oversees development of VBP performance monitoring dashboards for CMMI’s Transforming Maternity Health (TMaH) model. She also leads discrete analytic tasks on two Medicaid 1115 waiver evaluations for Minnesota and California, respectively. Meaghan also leads data collection and analytic tasks on multiple national evaluations, with a focus on mixed data integration and synthesis. She currently oversees design, development and maintenance of a mixed methods dataset for the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (REACH) Evaluation, and previously co-led analyses using configurational comparative methods to assess ACO performance for the Next Generation ACO (NGACO) Evaluation.

Prior to joining NORC in 2022, she contributed to several state and national evaluations at Abt Associates, including OWH’s Trauma-Informed Care Training Evaluation, CMMI’s Integrated Care for Kids and Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program Evaluations, and three HRSA HIV/AIDS Bureau studies. During that time, she also managed and then directed a study for the state of Minnesota developing and testing measures of HCBS access in the state’s Medicaid program, drawing from claims, assessment, and other data sources; and directed an evaluation of NYC Well, New York City’s 24/7 behavioral health helpline.