HRSA www.hrsa.gov within HHS has awarded $345 million to support families through the voluntary home visiting program. The program is administered by HRSA in partnership with the Administration for Children and Families www.acfr.hhs.gov.
The funding has enabled 2.3 million homes to be visited in 50 states and the District of Columbia, 825 counties, and territories, to specifically support the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program http://mchb.hrsa.gov/programs/homevisiting.
Basically, the MIECHV program helps communities with high rates of low birth weight infants, teens giving birth, families living in poverty, and communities dealing with the high rates of infant mortality.
For example, a few years ago with FY 2015 funding, the Department of Health in Utah http://health.utah.gov was awarded $1,043,901 through the MIECHV program to implement and strengthen community-based home visiting programs in communities at-risk.
The funding was needed since Utah has the highest birthrate in the country yet had a fragmented comprehensive early childhood system in place with only four evidence-based home visiting programs serving a limited number of eligible families.
Now the state has implemented more home visiting programs for at-risk communities, now provides training, has developed and maintains a data and monitoring system to support home visiting, and is working with other social service programs in the state and at the local level to strengthen the home visiting infrastructure.
In June 2016, it was announced that SBG Technology Solutions (SBG) www.sbgts.com was awarded a contract with HRSA’s Maternal Child Health Bureau (MCHB) to support further development of the Home Visiting Information System (HVIS) to replace the existing system.
SBG will gather, analyze, and document the requirements to develop a web-based system to replace the existing system and will be providing architectural, data, and cost models to support the new system.