Hennepin Healthy Family Program

About the Program

Category: Human Services (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

In the Metro Alliance for Health Families (MAHF) pilot program, 453 first-time parents enrolled in an intensive home-visiting program and were followed for 22 months. During this period, 42 or 9.3 percent of the families were investigated for child maltreatment. In 5 of these 42 families, or 1.1 percent of the sample, maltreatment was confirmed. This result compares favorably to the national benchmark of 21.9 percent. A 2005 cost/benefit study of the Dakota County pilot program found that intensive home visiting services costing $6,200 per target family projects to an avoidance of the cost of $26,000 per case from investigating and prosecuting a single case of abuse in the county’s child protection system. Research at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve estimated this cost avoidance to be $173,800 throughout the lifetime of an individual with a positive early childhood. IN 2010, Hennepin County sponsored a Legislative Briefing on the status of the Healthy family Initiative. An open discussion on federal, state, and county support of voluntary home visiting programs focused on the clinical validation of early childhood as a window of opportunity to break the vicious “birth to incarceration” cycle. To move further forward with the development of the program, the Early Childhood Program manager and the Director of Case Management sponsored the development of a cost/benefit computer model to effectively manage the programs’ business and operations. The use of the data collected during the MAHF pilot made program cost/benefit projections by the computer model specific to Hennepin County.