Tracking the Healthy Families America Initiative

The ability of the NCPCA to accurately track and report on HFA activities is essential for insuring program quality and development. Since HFA has been built upon those service delivery features found to have a measurable impact on participant outcomes, it is equally important to promote any new evaluative findings being generated by existing HFA sites. It is important not only to implement high quality programs, but also to document the characteristics of these interventions and their impacts on program participants.

The HFA initiative has the potential to provide policy and program planners with solid empirical data on a variety of issues (i.e., how to work with teen parents, middle class parents, substance abusing parents, fathers, non-English speaking parents, families in different geographical settings, etc.) Realizing this potential, however, requires both a forum for researchers to exchange and disseminate findings as well as a uniform means of describing HFA services and program participants and facilitating communication among sites. To address these needs, the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse (NCPCA) has established a Research Network, plans to create a Program Management Information System (PMIS) and communicates to many colleagues via Handsnet.

Research Network

The Healthy Families America initiative is underway in a range of communities with different economic, sociocultural and political climates. To improve program quality and contribute to the existing knowledge base of home visitation programs, sites have been urged to build in evaluations of their efforts. Given the potential importance of the overall HFA effort, it is critical for each site to include as comprehensive and as rigorous an evaluation component as possible. Virtually all of the existing HFA sites have some type of an evaluation and a significant number have evaluation contracts with major universities or state agencies. The research network provides an excellent opportunity for researchers assessing individual programs to come together to address a broad range of methodological and policy concerns.

The overall goals of the Research Network are to improve the quality, comparability and relevance of evaluations of HFA programs and to ensure they lead to distinct improvement in our knowledge about how to most effectively deliver such services, particularly as efforts attempt to become universal. Through on-going communication and collaboration, we hope the Network will contribute to the following outcomes:

Identification and use of more common data elements to describe HFA recipients and services;

Stronger "research" overall, including more randomized trials and more focused attention to

those research questions surrounding service delivery and client identification;

Greater comparability of outcome as well as descriptive data and thus greater ability to

compare and contrast findings across programs and populations;

A more realistic and appropriate interpretation of findings both positive and negative from

individual sites;

Better dissemination of findings from individual sites to program managers and policy makers

interested in home visitation programs in other locations across the country;

More useful or relevant research findings leading to stronger programs, built upon those

research findings; and

Expanded resources to support comprehensive evaluations of HFA efforts as funders respond

to the increased degree of collaboration and joint research designs emerging from the

Network's activities.

Program Management Information System

It is critical that we develop a uniform system for documenting the development of HFA sites nationwide and for describing the number and characteristics of families receiving services. The HFA Program Management Information System (PMIS) will be a data tracking and reporting system that will allow NCPCA to track the progress of HFA sites and compare their activities to those of other HFA sites in their state and across the country. It also will allow HFA sites to generate standard reports about their own program to support their advocacy and fundraising efforts.

The PMIS will consist of two interrelated data tracking components: a program development tracking system and a participant monitoring system. The program development tracking system will track information related to, among other features, the size of the program, the characteristics of the target area, the level and sources of funding, and basic staff characteristics. The participant monitoring system will generate reliable profiles on the specific number of families served by HFA sites, the characteristics of these families, the nature and level of the services provided, and a preliminary assessment of outcomes.

There are several benefits of a Program Management Information System including:

The ability of sites to share relevant information about how their programs are designed and

implemented;

The ability of sites to generate reports in an efficient manner to funders, legislators and others

on their progress;

The ability of sites to determine through a comparison of preliminary assessment measures and

other information if their program design needs to be altered in order to better meet the

participants' needs;

The ability of NCPCA to generate reports on the scope of HFA activities nationwide; and

The ability of NCPCA to disseminate reports and analysis on the development of the HFA

initiative with others who are working to improve outcomes for children and families.

Handsnet

To improve the speed and effectiveness of communication among Healthy Families America partners, the Healthy Families America initiative is using the Handsnet computer network. Handsnet brings together a diverse community of thousands of human service providers, national research centers and advocacy organizations. These organizations offer regular policy alerts and analysis, abstracts of key studies and reports, descriptions of model programs, Federal Register notices and other time-sensitive information.

Handsnet allows HFA sites to communicate with one another, NCPCA and a host of other organizations quickly and inexpensively. HFA sites are using Handsnet in a variety of ways including: communicating with NCPCA, the Hawaii Family Stress Center and other sites which cuts long distance phone costs, telephone tag and time zone problems; obtaining training materials from NCPCA and the field as well as sharing new training materials created for a particular state; opening a dialog between the participants on mutual issues, sharing of experiences, and question/answer boards; collecting evaluation data which ensures standard data formats and eliminates transcription errors; promoting their programs and successes through news and events postings; and networking with some of the other groups on Handsnet, such as legal service providers, health advocates and community development specialists.

Please contact the Healthy Families America staff at (312) 663-3520 if you have any questions about these activities.

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