Medicaid/Medically Indigent Program and Infant Mortality Rates for Guam, 2018 to 2021

For Guam's Department of Public Health, there has been a strong interest in examining birth outcomes amongst those using Medicaid/the Medically Indigent Program. Medicaid/MIP enrollment is a proxy for lower socioeconomic status, a measure otherwise missing from birth certificate data. This project, conducted during the Graduate Student Epidemiology Program in the summer of 2022, examined the odds of infant mortality for those who used Medicaid/MIP to pay for births compared to those who used private insurance/self-pay/unknown forms of insurance in Guam from 2018 to 2021. Further analysis was done in subpopulations, comparing outcomes between Medicaid/MIP users and those who used other forms of insurance within groups based on ethnicity, age, education, and utilization of prenatal care.