Spartanburg County, South Carolina, aims to enhance child and family health and well-being through the Hello Family initiative, offering a continuum of evidence-based early childhood services to its residents. Hello Family builds on parents’ strengths and equips them with knowledge, skills, and competence to promote healthy births and safe and thriving early years for their children. With funding from a Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) grant from US Treasury awarded in 2024, the county is building on the success of an earlier pilot initiative in Spartanburg City. SIPPRA funding is being used to expand doula services for pregnant women with low incomes and universal newborn home visiting to reduce the incidence of low-birthweight babies and emergency medical care use within the first six months of birth. The Urban Institute is the evaluator for this SIPPRA project.
This report provides background on the interventions included in the SIPPRA project, the target outcomes, and the evaluation design.
Why This Matters
Spartanburg residents have historically faced high child poverty rates and poor birth outcomes. Hello Family was designed to offer families parenting supports at critical points in early childhood development to improve child and family health and well-being and children’s school readiness. As part of Hello Family, the BirthMatters program provides reproductive health education and doula support to expectant mothers, prioritizing enrollment of Medicaid-eligible women under age 25. Meanwhile, Family Connects is a universal newborn home visiting program that offers postpartum nurse visits to support families with infants up to 6 months old. The Hello Family city-level pilot has shown evidence that these programs are improving targeted outcomes, motivating the county-wide expansion of services to reach more families.
How We Did It
The SIPPRA project selected two outcomes tied to success payments: the rate of low birthweight babies and emergency medical care use for babies under six months. Urban Institute as the selected evaluator will analyze population-level data on these outcomes for five annual birth cohorts—babies born in 2026 through 2030—to detect whether services offered through the Hello Family initiative significantly improved outcomes. Infant hospital visits will be calculated separately for Medicaid-paid visits and privately paid visits.
We will apply a synthetic control methods approach to detect differences between Spartanburg County and a synthetic control–weighted composite of other South Carolina counties. Estimation of program impacts in the post-treatment period is based on a calculation of differences between observed outcome values in the treatment site and the synthetic control.
