Metro Alliance for Healthy Families System

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2009

Dakota County designed a computer system to support a Public Health program called Metro Alliance for Healthy Families. It is an expanded replication of the successful Dakota Families Program. The Metro Alliance for Healthy Families overall goal is to give at-risk mothers the support and information they need to raise healthy, well-adjusted children. This goal is carried out through an intensive home visiting model, which includes tools and surveys administered by the home visitor. The newly designed computer system allows County staff and partnering agencies to search, view, add, and modify MAHF program data in a general database. The system not only performs the basic functions of data processing and storage, data security, and report printing, but supplies program coordinators and supervisors with performance tracking and outcome measurement reporting. As a result of this new functionality, tasks that previously took hours now take seconds to complete. In addition, the system produces a schedule of client survey and evaluation due dates. Since this schedule is viewable through a web browser by the home visitor, supervisors, and program staff, it enables each of them to track whether families are receiving timely and appropriate services consistent with the Healthy Families America model.