Home Visiting Promising Practices in the States

Overview

The Pew Charitable Trusts is producing a series of briefs that highlight promising state practices in home visiting. The featured state initiatives can serve as models for improving the efficiency and efficacy of state home visiting investments in order to expand the availability of high-quality services to more at-risk families.

Briefs

Kentucky’s HANDS home visiting program has embraced an innovative funding strategy, using Medicaid dollars to support an integrated set of health and mental health services for eligible families. This brief takes an in-depth look at the Kentucky approach and identifies opportunities to leverage this strategy to meet requirements for the federal MIECHV program and offers recommendations for other states interested in implementing a similar approach.

In 2001, the Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund pioneered an innovation in evidence-based home visiting when it began building the data collection and analysis capacity to both monitor the delivery of home visiting services and track whether those services were contributing to healthier, more secure families. This case study examines the process that the Trust Fund and Healthy Families Massachusetts went through, the choices they made, and the challenges they encountered. Overall, this study has found that objective performance and outcome data are at the heart of efforts to document and improve the effectiveness of home visiting services.

See the Home Visiting Campaign’s main page for more information.