2. 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.

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

4. 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

5. HMIS Project Types

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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

10. Front Line Users and Data (cont.)

11. 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

12. 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.

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

14. System Performance Measures

15. System Performance Measures

16. System Performance Measures

17. 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

18. 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

19. HMIS Site Visit Checklist

20. NOFA Scoring Rubric

21. 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

23. 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
Ana Rausch, MA
Ryan Clay, MA