Coalition for the Homeless Mission: To provide leadership in the development, advocacy, and coordination of community strategies to prevent and end homelessness. Role: Coordinate the community response to homelessness Lead agency for the TX-700 Continuum of Care (CoC) Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) lead.

Senior Research Project Manager Coalition HMIS Staff Senior Research Project Manager Data Analyst Data Analyst Program Analyst Program Analyst System Analyst Program Analyst

Coalition HMIS Stats The Coalition for the Homeless has been the HMIS Lead Agency for our CoC (TX-700) since 2004 The TX-700 CoC includes Harris, Fort Bend, & Montgomery Counties (over 3700 sq miles) Current system size: 78 organizations 241 projects 778 end users 24,888 annual homeless clients 251,815 total client records

HMIS Project Types

Strategies Help the users, to encourage data participation HMIS Forums Help Desk Make the data matter Trainings System Performance Measures Check to see if it’s working Monitoring NOFA Scoring Site Visits

Engaging Partners Answer the question, “what’s in it for me”? Allow for proactive meeting of needs and goal achievement Exposure opportunities Provide funding options Explain the benefits of CoC and HMIS participation Advocate for collaboration Address client security and privacy concerns HMIS usage is critical to show the true need in a community. In addition, data transparency is essential when making decisions around resource allocation and how much of each intervention is needed in your system. Over the past 10 years, there have been great strides made within the HMIS user community. Despite this there is still hesitation amongst non-HUD funded agencies to use the system.

Front Line Users and Data Empower users through inclusion in some of the decision-making processes A “day in the life” Encourage best practice recommendations from the user community Host quarterly forums Rewards Recognition Games A day in the life—Assess current data collection processes and procedures. We used site visits to see how some of the agencies actually function. Made it easier to determine how to best make the system work for them. From this we came up with different workflows in the system. Policies and procedures and support committee—Through the use of the support committee developed data quality standards, streamlined services in HMIS, and devised rules and enforcement processes. Include make up of support committee. Use the forums as a time to share valuable information with users. Acknowledge the work they are doing as a community and the outcomes. Share both the successes and failures.

HMIS Support Committee Meets Quarterly Discuss issues that have come up Provide communication from within their own agency/partners Developed all HMIS Policies & Procedures Examples include a standard service list for the entire CoC Recommended changes are sent to CoC Steering for approval Members from various service provider types ES, TH, RRH, PSH, health, & local government Self-governing with HMIS Lead as guidance only

Front Line Users and Data (cont.)

Help When Needed Dedicated help line Open Hours Tuesday – Thursday 9AM – 11AM & 1PM – 2PM Recommend real time data entry where possible Dedicated points of contact for all HMIS related issues

Data Integrity Make data quality a priority Data is important to getting the funding you need to do what you do A critical part of ending homelessness is good data Understand what is data quality Data completeness Data timeliness Accuracy Maintain some level of uniformity Examples of data completeness—client provides a response for prior living situation but no response of the length of stay in that situation and vice versa; race but no ethnicity. Accuracy and timeliness can go hand in hand. The longer it takes to enter data the greater the chance of errors. The same happens with exiting. While recognizing that data alone cannot end homelessness, maintaining good data is a critical step. It allows for analyzing and understanding trends, which leads to decision making on both a local and national level.

Best Practices Trainings New User Refresher Reports Programmatic Supervisor -How many trainings per month offered?

System Performance Measures

System Performance Measures

System Performance Measures

System Performance Measures Discontinue auto-exits for any housing and outreach programs Address common data quality issues Review income and housing data quality Generate quarterly System performance reports Display SPMs to the entire CoC at quarterly provider forums

HMIS Monitoring Processes Monthly reports Enrollment Data quality Quarterly reports APR CAPER AHAR/LSA System Performance Annual reports Annual site visits System review Active programs Housing set up Duplicate clients NOFA

HMIS Site Visit Checklist

NOFA Scoring Rubric

Lessons Learned Continuous quality improvement Keep the information flowing Promote inter-community communication and participation Encourage ownership Data quality and community participation must be promoted and encouraged on a continuous basis. It cannot be a one time process. Ask questions—what do you like? Dislike? What would you change? Encourage ownership—it ensures that everyone involved has a clear understanding of the ultimate goal and the steps it takes to get there. Community participation—the motivation involved fosters a better collaboration and a greater awareness of each other’s responsibilities

The Way Home is the collaborative model to prevent Thank You!! The Coalition for the Homeless leads in the development, advocacy, and coordination of community strategies to prevent and end homelessness. The Way Home is the collaborative model to prevent and end homelessness in Houston, Harris, Ft. Bend, & Montgomery Counties. For more information visit www.thewayhomehouston.org Ana Rausch, MA arausch@homelesshouston.org Ryan Clay, MA rclay@homelesshouston.org