Increasing Home Visiting Enrollment through Enhanced Outreach.

We explore whether enhanced outreach to a randomly selected subset of individuals referred to Michigan's Maternal Infant Health Program (MIHP) can increase enrollment in the home visiting program. We randomly assigned 824 study-eligible families in three MIHP sites to a treatment group, which received enhanced outreach by locally hired community health workers (CHWs), or to a control group, which received standard outreach from the agency's enrollment specialist. Families who received enhanced services were more likely to be reached and were more likely to enroll in MIHP. However, conditional on being reached, we find that the CHWs were no more effective than agency staff in persuading families to enroll, suggesting that the power of the intervention was primarily in the additional time and effort CHWs were able to devote to contacting families, not in their ability to provide more authentic and trusted information or to reduce other barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]