By Shannon Turgeon
Photography by Joshua Franzos
Deirdre Quinn, assistant professor of medicine, School of Medicine, first became interested in reproductive health care in middle school.
“That was the first time I realized that law or policy could impact who gets access to a particular kind of health care and who doesn’t,” she said.
However, Quinn, who is also a core investigator at the Center for Healthcare Evaluation, Research, and Promotion (CHERP) at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System-University Drive, has not had a linear journey to health services research.
She earned advanced degrees in creative writing and gender and social policy, lived abroad for several years and held roles in unrelated industries.
But she never let go of her interest in women’s health and access to care—which eventually led her to earn a PhD in family science, where she dove into research on reproductive health.
As a postdoctoral student, Quinn felt drawn to focus on female veterans after learning about the knowledge gaps that exist around pregnancy and reproductive health care in this population.
“The VA is an institution that was developed for men. Women’s health care in the VA has had to play a lot of catch up. They’ve done so quickly, and they’ve done it really well, but that was so interesting to me: thinking about a population that’s part of this huge integrated system, and yet it wasn’t designed for them,” she said.
On Friday, Sept. 18, Quinn will present “Improving Quality and Access in Reproductive Health and Health Care for Women Veterans” as part of the 2026 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Research Seminar Series. (Join the lecture here.)
Quinn’s research has focused on health before pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes, as well as expanding access to and quality of contraceptive care for female veterans.
Her team takes a mixed-methods approach, combining tasks like large-scale health data analysis with interviews, surveys and implementation projects.
Using a statistical method called latent class analysis, they’ve identified distinct health profiles among female veterans based on which chronic conditions tend to cluster together.
“A lot of people are healthy and have zero or one chronic condition, but for people managing multiple chronic conditions who also want to get pregnant, understanding how those conditions interact matters,” she said.
Her team is now exploring whether membership in those health profile groups is associated with negative outcomes during and after pregnancy in the hope of informing future interventions.
In addition, Quinn’s research on the quality and accessibility of contraceptive care across the VA led to a program called Contraception on Demand.
The initiative enables VA pharmacists to independently prescribe contraception to veterans—saving them a trip to the doctor and removing a barrier to care.
“We’ve done over 900 of these pharmacist contraceptive visits, most leading to a prescription being dispensed. Veterans found it an easy, convenient way to get contraceptive care, and pharmacists reported improved job satisfaction and reduced burnout,” she said.
Contraception on Demand can operate nationwide because VA, as a federal system, isn’t bound by individual state laws (some of which prevent community pharmacists from prescribing medications).
Now, as a coinvestigator on the PA Catalyst project, Quinn is working to build evidence for the expansion of pharmacist-provided contraception to pharmacies across the state, outside of the VA system.
“The biggest impact would be knowing we successfully expanded access to high quality, comprehensive reproductive health care,” says Quinn.
The goal, she said, is to “put tools out into the world that help make care more patient-centered and adaptable.”