Composition of the abortion care workforce: A claims-based approach
Abortion
Awarded 2025
Documenting the composition of clinicians providing abortion care
Julia Strasser, DrPH, MPH
George Washington University
$75,000

Access to abortion depends in large part on the workforce of clinicians who provide it, but there is significant variation in this workforce. The Dobbs v Jackson decision in June 2022 resulted in massive changes in the ability to provide abortion care, and updated data is critical to our understanding of abortion access. This study uses large, national-level claims and administrative datasets from 2020-2025 to identify and characterize the abortion care workforce, as well as volume of services by provider type. To identify clinicians providing both medication and procedural abortion, we will identify abortion services in the IQVIA and Komodo datasets, which contain encounter-level data representing around 330 million patients across the US. By using both medical and prescription claims, we will capture information on both procedural and medication abortion services, including mail, retail, and provider-dispensed prescriptions. We will then identify clinician type using National Provider Identifiers (NPIs), unique 10-digit numbers that are required for providers who conduct HIPAA-covered transactions and which do not change even if a provider changes their name or practice location. This approach allows us to capture detailed information on actual abortion service provision that is not subject to reporting bias and identifies multiple clinician specialties in states across the US. This project will answer two main research questions: 1. What is the Specialty Distribution of Clinicians Providing Medication and/or Procedural Abortion Care Across the US? and 2. What is the Volume of Abortion Services by Clinician Type and Abortion Type in Large National Claims Datasets?