MIECHV Evaluation & Research

From its inception, the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program has adopted a learning agenda approach that focuses research and evaluation efforts on improving program effectiveness and building the knowledge base. MIECHV promotes rigorous evaluation at the national, state, and local levels and supports research infrastructure in the field.

HRSA also requires MIECHV awardees to collect certain data and report on their program’s performance. For more information, visit the MIECHV Data & Continuous Quality Improvement page.

State-Led Evaluations

HRSA, in partnership with the Administration of Children and Families (ACF), supports awardees in conducting rigorous evaluations of their programs. State-led evaluations help to a) build the evidence of effectiveness on promising approach home visiting models, b) examine the replication of evidence-based home visiting models across new settings and contexts, c) answer questions of local salience, and d) use empirical information to improve service delivery.

Awardees who chose to implement a model that qualifies as a promising approach are required to conduct a well-designed and rigorous evaluation of the program’s impact. MIECHV evaluations of promising approach models are expected to help build the evidence base around the service delivery model towards HHS’ evidence of effectiveness. See the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness website.

In FY 2021, HRSA launched a new approach to voluntary, state-led evaluation of evidence-based home visiting programs. Under this new approach, referred to as coordinated state evaluation, MIECHV awardees conducting state-led evaluation must select to conduct evaluation on a priority topic, identified by HRSA, in coordination with other MIECHV awardees. In consultation with key partners, HRSA identified four priority topic areas in which awardees could propose to conduct coordinated state evaluations:

Family engagement & health equity,
Implementation quality/fidelity,
Maternal health, and
Workforce development.

Participating awardees work together in peer networks with technical assistance specialists to plan and conduct evaluations aligned around a shared agenda and common elements.

HRSA places an emphasis on dissemination, encouraging awardees to share information and learn from each other by highlighting evaluation experiences and findings through webinars, technical assistance documents, program newsletters, and meetings and conferences.

Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE)

ACF, in collaboration with HRSA, is overseeing a large-scale, random assignment evaluation of the effectiveness of the MIECHV Program: The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Evaluation (MIHOPE).

Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Research and Development Platform

On May 28, 2017, HRSA awarded $1.3 million to Johns Hopkins University to support a cooperative agreement for the Home Visiting Research and Development (R&D) Platform.

This funding aims to support one transdisciplinary research network for scientific collaboration and infrastructure building for innovative home visiting research. The research network will produce meaningful impacts that will significantly extend the evidence-base of home visiting.

Part of this investment is to plan for, develop, and sustain a R&D network of early childhood development and learning researchers and practitioners who will frame, implement, and report on innovative, transdisciplinary research related to precision interventions to improve meaningful outcomes for at-risk families and communities. Find out more information at the Home Visiting Applied Research Collaborative's website.

Measuring Implementation Quality in MIECHV-Funded Evidence-Based Home Visiting Programs

The Measuring Implementation Quality in MIECHV-Funded Evidence-Based Home Visiting Programs Evaluation aims to identify how implementation quality measurement can better support MIECHV awardees in program decision making. Implementing evidence-based home visiting programs in alignment with model fidelity and implementation standards is important for achieving expected outcomes. However, there is no agreed-upon conceptualization of home visiting implementation quality and limited evidence about which specific features of implementation promote better family outcomes. To address these gaps, HRSA, in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), contracted with Child Trends and James Bell Associates to develop a conceptual framework for implementation quality in home visiting.

The conceptual framework presented in this report offers people working in the home visiting field a way of thinking about implementation quality across all levels of the home visiting system and across broad aspects of quality. The framework can be used as a guide for reflecting on their own efforts to promote implementation quality.