Johns Hopkins Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy and Management Anne K. Duggan, Sc.D., has received a three-year award from the Health Services Research Administration to establish a national Home Visiting Research Network (HVRN). Duggan will direct the network and lead its executive team of seasoned home visiting researchers and research educators from Johns Hopkins, Columbia University, University of Oklahoma and the Erikson Institute, among others.

HVRN is designed to help improve the lives of mothers, infants and young children by strengthening home visiting service models; developing innovative research methods; translating research into policy and practice; and supporting the professional development of the next generation of home visiting researchers.

For 20 years, Duggan studied the role of home visitation in promoting child and family health and development, and parenting, and is a nationally recognized researcher in the field. Her primary area of research is early childhood and the role of integrated primary care and home visiting in preventing child maltreatment and promoting health and development of children in at-risk families. Using implementation science, she and her team have focused for many years on ways to strengthen the role of home visiting and primary care by improving service models and implementation systems. The HVRN will foster similar work, with investigators focusing on home visiting sites across the country. Related research: Home Visiting Program Falls Short of Goal to Prevent Child Maltreatment

Duggan was a principal investigator in studies of community-based randomized trials of home visitation in Hawaii and Alaska, and leads additional studies of Baltimore’s “Success by 6” Partnership, designed to improve the health and development of children in selected Baltimore communities. She and her team now conduct statewide evaluative research of home visiting as part of the systems of care for families with young children in Hawaii and New Jersey.

Duggan is also co-principal investigator of DHHS’s experimental study of the new national Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, a randomized trial involving over 5000 families in 85 home visiting program sites in 12 states. HVRN research will complement this study.

Duggan’s fellow Johns Hopkins HVRN executive team members are Cynthia Minkovitz, M.D., a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, and Sarah Crowne, Ph.D., a research associate in Pediatrics and an instructor in Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Funding for HVRN is provided by the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program under the Affordable Care Act.

For more information, contact HVRN Coordinator Kay Gonsalves, 410-502-0545.