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>> Martha Moorehouse: Good Morning. Thank you all for coming together. I am Martha
Moorehouse. I am going to give you all of my affiliations: I'm the Division Director
for Children and Youth Policy in the Office of Human Services
Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning
and Evaluation in the US Department of Health and Human Services. [laughter] There you go.
An accomplishment right there.
So, I'm very pleased to welcome you today to our meeting on evidence-based policies
and programs. I sometimes think this is a an ongoing, running
conversation both in our federal conversations--we actually have staff who've spontaneously found
themselves meeting across initiatives to talk about
work around evidence-based policy issues and more people want to join. And, we've had a
lot of excitement about this meeting. It's been gleam
in our eye for a long time and we very much appreciate all the work and travel that's
gone on in convening here today. And, I'm very pleased to be able to open the
meeting with our Assistant Secretary Sherry Glied here.
Sherry was sworn in as our Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the US Department
of Health and Human Services in July of 2010.
She came to us from her work at the Columbia University's
Mailman School of Public Health where she'd been chair and professor in the Department
of Health Policy and Management. She's had distinguished
service as a senior economist for healthcare and
labor market policy on the President's Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Bush
and Clinton and has participated in several phases of
health care reform work. Her principle areas of research are
on health policy reform and in mental health care and I'm very pleased to introduce her
to you today. [applause]
>> Sherry Glied: Thank you, Martha. I'm really delighted, on behalf of the Office of the
Assistant Secretary, to welcome all of you here today.
I really appreciate your coming together to discuss these
extremely important issues and I think one of the things that has really been striking
to me, looking at the scope of all the things we do across Health
and Human Services, is that as an administration that is
really committed to doing evidence-based policy the challenges of implementing and replicating
evidence-based programs are actually… they occur in every dimension of what we do--from
health policy, mental health policy, child policy,
welfare policy, and so on. And so it's really very, very exciting
and important for us to learn from all of the experts in the room about how we can do
this better. And I'm really excited to learn about the challenges
all of you've encountered in replicating programs around children and youth. So, I'm gonna leave
Martha with the session cause she actually knows
what's happening, and thank you again for coming.
[applause] >> Martha Moorehouse: So, I'm going to give
you an overview of the project and some of the key
initiatives we're going to focus on here today in the evidence-based policy and program worlds.
So, our goals of the projects are to [pause] I'm
going to move these slides forward… So, our goals here are
to identify the challenges faced by program implementers as they implement evidence-based
programs for children and youth. We also want to assess the state of knowledge from research
and practice that helps to address these challenges.
And, we want to synthesize lessons learned about
replicating and scaling up evidence-based models and implementing evidence-informed
or innovative strategies. Our central task in the meeting
and our following work around convening this forum to
highlight key issues and topics related to selecting evidence-based policies and programs
for replication, addressing issues of fidelity
and adaptation-when is an adaptation the same program, and
when is an adaptation a different program is a hot issue out there. And, we're also
focusing on the challenges now of scaling up evidence-based
programs as well as innovating and using broader evidence to inform strategies where we don't
have tested evidence-based models to work from or
where we're entering new arenas and need to find solutions that work for children, youth,
and families. We'll be creating a set of issue
papers for the field that synthesize the knowledge base and
identify knowledge gaps related to the key issues that are discussed today. So, our key
evidence- based initiatives in HHS that we'll be focusing
on today are in three areas. We're going to focus on
Maternal, Infants and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, sometimes known as HV but
known as the Home Visiting Program Initiative. In the
Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, we have two
programs that have been developed. We have the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and
the Personal Responsibility Education Program,
which we call TPP and PREP, which you may hear me creep
into the acronyms here. And then we have the Permanency Innovations Initiative. So, we
are not going to do the pre test to see how many people
here actually knew about all three initiatives, but we
have lots of expertise in the room on at least one, and sometimes two, and possibly all three
initiatives. In our work in ASPE, over time, we've been always interested in what ways
we can answer questions about what works. And we've used
a variety of methods including experimental studies,
randomized experiments to answer this question along with other quantitative and qualitative
methods, as well returning to the basic research to try to understand what we're learning about
new factors that can affect the way we think about
policy and research. And as you know there's been ever
increasing interest and demand to show that we are investing in programs and policies
that are working. The administration has committed
to the three investments in this area. We have new
funding in these areas and we also have had support from the Congress in putting these
initiatives into place. And, on this slide it sketches out
for you…so we frame what these three initiatives are about,
what their key goals are. So, we have in the early childhood, um excuse me, in the home
visiting initiative, the work with states. We're supporting
states who then are focusing on their service areas,
which we'll hear more about over the course of the conference and focus on implementing
evidence- based home visitation programs to meet the
range of goals that are listed. So, this is really an
extensive set of outcomes that are sought for these programs. In the Teen Pregnancy
Prevention Initiatives, we have evidence-based programs
that are going out from, to communities or the regional
level in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program and to the states through the PREP program
to promote evidence-based programs with some
different areas of focus and outcomes and scope that
are represented on the slide. And then we have, in the Permanency Innovation Initiative,
an area where we don't have an existing range of tested
models. So, this is really focusing on how do you go
out and implement and test programs in this area. This gives you some more basic information
about these initiatives just as background for the
work that we're talking about today. In the home visiting
world, states have been developing, going through an extensive planning process. They've
had an initial base grant funding and will be drawing
down the full array of funds as their final plans are
approved. You have information here on the seventy-five percent of funds that were to
be directed towards implementing evidence-based service
models that meet the criteria listed here around
demonstrating significant positive effect when evaluated using well-designed and rigorous
research studies, being in existence for at least three
years, having a national organization or institute of higher
education, and having comprehensive program standards. So, these were actually embodied
in the statute that put these programs into place.
There's also promotion of innovation for states, and then
there's a special tribal home visiting program. In the teen pregnancy prevention realm, we
have the same tier structure that you'll notice from
home visiting, where we're putting funds into replicating
evidence-based programs. Seventy-five million has been awarded to seventy-five grantees
to support the replication of models that have had rigorous
evaluation behind them. And then there's a research
and demonstration tier of innovation that also has supported in the PREP program. And,
with the PREP, forty-six states have come in for the
funding to replicate evidence-based programs and focus on
incorporating adulthood preparation subjects as well. In the Permanency Innovation Initiative,
the goals are around implementing intervention
strategies informed by the relevant literature to reduce
long-term foster care stays. This is focusing around children and youth who are most vulnerable
to long-term foster care stays. And, it comes
with rigorous evaluation of these efforts to test these
models and their implementation. And, I should say that the other teen pregnancy and home
visiting models are also accompanied by new extensive
evaluation efforts. Across these three initiatives we have extensive
teams in place within agencies and in some cases
across agencies with ACF, HRSA and the Office of Adolescent Health here today. And there
are extensive work going on, not only in these
federal teams but with contracts and with consultation with
experts to really get these initiatives implemented. We don't have often a chance to step back
and actually there is no other forums, this is
the first forum to look at all three together, and also draw on
the broader work that's been going on in the implementation realm to think about what do
we know, what are we learning as we're doing this work,
what can we bring to bear and what's our agenda going
forward? So as we turn to these questions, we have taken these steps and we also identified
evidence-based programs to date, as many of you know, it's a very hot topic around the
evidence reviews that we've done. And what we wanna
focus on though, we'll continue to learn in those areas
and have effort underway to add to those reviews and advance them. We also now need to say
the rubber's hitting the road, what are we really
able to do around implementation. So that's our focus
next and I'm going to turn to David Harris to talk about the road ahead and the questions
we hope you'll help us with today.
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