Blog

John Howard Society of PEI's Lunch & Learn

I was invited to be on a webinar today as part of the John Howard Society of PEI's John Howard Society Week 2024! I was interviewed about data collection and why it's important, Point in Time Counts, and of course, HIFIS. Give it a listen, if you're interested! (It's on YouTube, but it's audio only.)

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Takeaways from #CAEH23

And that's a wrap on #CAEH23. Here's the highlights of what I learned this year:

  1. The proportion of people experiencing chronic homelessness, nationally, rose from 60% of respondents in 2018 to 70% of respondents in 2020-2022, according to national PIT Count data. @Sajidul Quayum
  2. Every $1 investment in indigenous housing annually results in a 740% social return on investment @Margaret Pfoh
  3. Check out the Thompson Model. In Thompson, Manitoba, the Lived Experience Circle makes the decisions ab…

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Bed-Nights Happen At Midnight

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From time to time, people ask me about how a report handles bed-nights. Unless otherwise specified, a bed-night is counted if a client is booked in at exactly midnight.

That means that there is no minimum stay length. If a client books in at 11:59pm and then books out at 12:01am (2 minutes later), that counts as a bed-night.

That means that if someone books in at 1am and stays the entire rest of the night, that does not count as a bed-night.

That means if someone is there at check-in and slee…

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Expanded Contact Information

Robin Hood - Contact Info

Have you ever had a client that didn't have a cell phone number and couldn't reliably access the internet to check their email?

...

That was rhetorical. Of course you have!

Typically, we use the Contact Info tab on the Client Vitals screen to record the way we can contact our client, but the default options are out-of-date and fairly limited. Like, who has a pager or a fax machine these days?

What if I told you that instead you could make this tab way more useful?

The first thing that you'd…

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What's the difference between the Unique Identifier List and the Coordinated Access module?

Communities are often confused about the Unique Identifier List (UIL) which is found in the HIFIS Reports section of the Report Manager, and the Coordinated Access module, which is labeled as the Coordinated Access - Unique Identifier List and can be accessed through the Front Desk > Coordinated Access.

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Making the most of Transitional housing status

As of HIFIS version 4.0.59, there's a new feature that identifies the client's Housing Status.

The Housing Status is derived from a combination of both the client's Housing History and their Admissions, and can be one of 5 statuses:

  1. Housed
  2. Homeless
  3. Chronically Homeless
  4. Unknown
  5. Transitional

You can look up the Housing Types that belong to the Housed, Homeless, and Transitional categories in Administration > Housing Continuum by looking up the Reaching Home Continuum. A client is Chroni…

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Takeaways from #CAEH22

And that's a wrap on #CAEH22. It was so great to see so many faces that have only been Zoom personalities for the past three years.

  1. We need to get better at getting out of the way of indigenous-led housing programs that are doing a great job @Celest Hayward @Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi
  2. New Zealand is dealing with many of the same challenges we are in Canada @Ali Hamlin-Paenga
  3. We can't just bulldoze an encampment and assume that'll solve the problem. We've got to work on understanding the root cause…

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Homelessness Data Self-Assessment

 We've done Crystal Reports training with a number of students, and we find that while some students take to the materials (relatively) easily, others find it a struggle. But here's the thing - if you find it a struggle during the training, you're probably still going to be struggling when it becomes your job to write new reports for your community. So maybe learning to manipulate data through Crystal Reports isn't a good fit for your skill set. So maybe you shouldn't have taken the training aft…

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HIFIS 4 Deployment Options in British Columbia

Communities in British Columbia have been caught between a rock and a hard place, HIFIS-wise, with BC Housing holding a provincial license but only utilizing it for their own funded programs, and Designated Communities now being required under Reaching Home to adopt HIFIS and Coordinated Access locally.

ACRE Consulting was hired by Employment and Skills Development Canada (now Infrastructure Canada) to identify viable options for HIFIS deployment across British Columbia, and the report is now pub…

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My Initial Thoughts on the Ontario HPP Program

As of April 1, 2022, Ontario communities now have new funding requirements through the HPP program. There's a lot to take in here, so many communities are rightly concerned about what this means for them. In particular, those using HIFIS are wondering how they should start recording data so that they can pull it out at the end of the year.

I'm afraid that I don't have all the answers yet, but since so many people are thinking about this right now, I thought it would be good to start a discussio…

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