Nicole Hrycyk

Nicole Hrycyk focuses on overseeing and improving the quality of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). She specializes in Medicaid managed care, program evaluation, and technical assistance (TA).

Since joining Mathematica in 2021, Hrycyk has provided TA and analytic support to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) by reviewing and analyzing External Quality Review technical reports, state quality strategies, and state websites. In this role, she oversees state-specific TA deliverables and targeted TA, and she directs a task involving the abstraction and analysis of data on quality improvement initiatives. Hrycyk is also a senior advisor to a team helping CMS and states implement, monitor, and evaluate eligibility and coverage policies for Medicaid Section 1115 demonstrations. In addition, she contributed to studies for the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, including one project examining tools used to oversee and enforce compliance among Medicaid managed care organizations. For these projects, Hrycyk developed review criteria and data collection tools for a literature and federal policy review, created interview protocols, conducted stakeholder interviews, and conducted qualitative analysis.

Before joining Mathematica, Hrycyk was a program evaluation team lead in the Office of Evaluation and Inspections, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’s) Office of Inspector General. In that role, she led national evaluations of HHS programs, with a focus on Medicaid. Hrycyk has a master’s degree in social service administration from the University of Chicago