The Community Outcomes Report. The Reaching Home Outcomes Report. The Community Homelessness Report. The CAEH Inflow/Outflow Report. The HPP 3. BNL Report.
It’s a lot, we know.
In this blog post, we’re going to answer you the following questions: Why are there so many different inflow/outflow reports? And if two of them give me different numbers, which one should I believe?
The Road to Where We Are Today
First, a little bit of history. Many years ago, Community Solutions, a US non-profit, started really diving into what metrics are important to measure related to homelessness, and they’re the ones that really ended developing the concept of inflow and outflow, with 6 (or so) key metrics. The six key metrics are:
Active homelessness
Inflow: Newly homeless
Inflow: Returns to homelessness
Inflow: Return from inactive
Outflow: Move-ins
Outflow: Moves to inactive/lost contact
(Could there be other metrics, such as deceased clients? Yes, but these were the original ones.)
Not long after, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness started adopting this framework for use in Canada, in particular with their then 20K Homes, now Built for Zero Canada movement. They encouraged communities to keep a spreadsheet that contained a list of everyone they knew to be homeless, and record updates and changes on the spreadsheet.
Some communities were already using HIFIS when this was occurring, but at the time it was very difficult to get this data out of HIFIS. Why? Because at the time, HIFIS couldn’t tell whether a client was experiencing homelessness or not, and didn’t keep track of whether a client was currently active (i.e. recently interacted with a service provider) or not. The best we had available was a move-in report, developed back in 2018, that could track move-ins but no other data points.
Coordinated Access in HIFIS
In December 2020, HIFIS version 4.0.59.1 was released. This included the new housing status indicator, as well as automatic activity/inactivity detection, a calculation of chronic homelessness, and the Coordinated Access module. For the first time, it made it viable to track inflow and outflow to and from homelessness in HIFIS.
Working with the CAEH, we developed an inflow/outflow report in early 2021, based on these six data points that the CAEH has been encouraging communities to pay attention to for years. It’s been revised many times, and improved and fixed and updated for newer versions of HIFIS, and so on.
Around the same time, the federal government, who might have been Infrastructure Canada at the time (now HICC), asked us to develop a similar report to align with their new outcomes-based reporting requirements. This report would be called the Community Homelessness Report (CHR). Development of that started in 2021 and continued into 2022, and by the time it was signed off on… the reporting requirements had changed. So we began work on the CHR 2.0, which was completed in late 2022 and ultimately this was the first federal inflow/outflow report that was released to the public. If you go into your HIFIS Report Manager, to HIFIS Reports, and look for “Reaching Home Community Outcomes,” that’s this report. The CHR, however, only looked at active homeless and inflow (newly identified, and returned to homelessness from housing). Many communities found that it didn’t particularly meet their needs.
Meanwhile, the Ontario provincial government was now asking communities to report on their inflow and outflow, and the CAEH was asking communities to also report their inflow/outflow data. The Homelessness Indicator Project asked communities to report monthly. Many communities were being asked to report three different similar sets of numbers to three different entities every month. And because the reports weren’t consistent with each other, communities were reporting different numbers at different times. This led to a lot of confusion. (Why were they different? We’ll get to that in a bit.)
One Report To Rule Them All
In 2024, the CAEH and HICC got together to collaborate on having a single way of doing things. A single report, that would be called the Community Outcomes Report (COR), that would be used by both parties. That would give communities a single source of truth, one single set of numbers, that could be relied upon and used for all purposes.
Well, that was the theory, anyways.
After a lot of collaboration, the COR report was finalized and released, using agreed-upon rules. What rules, you ask? Well things like how clients with Unknown housing status should be handled, or children in families. In fact, we previously identified 9 key differences between the CAEH and the CHR reports, and so each of those differences was discussed to come up with one consistent solution.
After the COR was released, communities were encouraged (required?) to begin using it. But this caused some challenges because the numbers were just different from before. Some changes might have made your numbers appear higher; some might have made your numbers appear lower, and so what ended up happening is you’d have one report that said you had 83 chronically homeless people and another that said you had 87 chronically homeless people and another that said you had 91 chronically homeless people. In some communities, the difference was very noticeable (off by hundreds), while in others it was off by a small enough number that data gurus started combing through the individual discrepancies to figure out why Steve was being counted on one report and not the other.
Communities, understandably, want to have confidence in their data. If they have three different reports with three different numbers, how can they know which one is correct?
Well, it’s complicated.
Let’s Start With What We Can Agree On
To begin with, every single inflow/outflow report we’ve ever made has the same basic rules: we care about the intersection between a client’s housing status and their activity status. Imagine a grid that looks something like this:
Housing Status: Homeless | Housing Status: Housed (or something else) | |
Activity Status: Active | Active + Homeless | Active + Housed |
Activity Status: Inactive (or something else) | Inactive + Homeless | Inactive + Housed |
(This is definitely an oversimplification. As of 4.0.60.5 there are 4 activity statuses and 5 homeless statuses, but let’s pretend there are only two of each.)
At any given time (including right now), any given client is going to be in one of these boxes. The main one that we care about is Active + Homeless. When a client is both active (i.e. they’ve had a recent interaction with a service provider) and homeless, we count them as “Actively Homeless” and this is the most important metric that any inflow/outflow report is going to report on.
When a client’s housing status changes, or their activity status changes, they move to a different box. If they move from Active + Homeless to Active + Housed, that’s a move from active homelessness to housing (a move-in), and we count that as a success. Yay! If they move from Active + Housed to Active + Homeless, that’s a move from housing to homelessness (inflow), and we can check whether this is the first time that’s happened for the client and it’s either counted as new to homelessness or a return to homelessness. We’d count it the same if they move from Inactive + Housed to Active + Homeless. Basically, we only care about transitions into and out of the Active + Homeless box, and clients who are currently in the Active + Homeless box.
The Devil’s in the Details
Unfortunately, once you get into the weeds, things start to get a bit murky. Let’s give you some example questions:
What happens if a client is Inactive + Housed, and they move from that box to Active + Homeless in an instant, such as by booking into shelter? Should that get counted as a Return from Inactive or a Return from Housed? The answer is pretty clear, it should be a Return from Housed, but the report would need to be programmed to handle that specific edge case where both transitions happen at the same time.
What if you have a homeless family, and the children aren’t directly interacting with a service provider, so the children in the family are Inactive? The whole family moves into housing, but only the parent’s files are Active + Homeless. Should only the parents be counted, or should the children count too? The children should probably be counted, but that creates an exception to the general rule. What other exceptions do we also need?
What happens if a client refuses consent and gives a false name? If you count them among active homelessness, can you be sure they aren’t being counted more than once with different aliases? Or should you exclude them, even though you know that they are a human who is homeless?
If a client moves into Transitional housing, does that count as a move to housing? Or are they still considered homeless? If they're still considered homeless and they later become Housed, does that mean we need to include everyone who is Transitional + Active in the actively homeless count?
What if a client’s housing status is Unknown (i.e. no data), and then a new record is added indicating they are now housed? Should the report count that as an exit from homelessness, when we don’t know if the client was ever homeless?
What if a client was staying in shelter for a while, then the leave shelter to an Unknown housing situation, and a couple weeks later, their case manager helps them move in to a new apartment? How should that get counted?
Did I say things get “a bit” murky? I mean very murky. When you add together all of these edge cases and nuances, the effects can really compound. For example, if you have a lot of clients refusing consent and one report counts them and another report doesn’t count them, that could result in a major difference between two reports on its own. But when you combine that effect with differences related to Transitional, Public Institution, and Unknown housing statuses, and add to the mix children in families, you can end up with very significant differences.
CAEH Inflow/Outflow, CHR, and COR
So how do you know how each report is handling all of the different nuances? Check the documentation!
I’m going to do my best right now to compile some resources about these various reports that should help:
Community Outcomes Report on the Homelessness Learning Hub. Includes the:
The CAEH Inflow/Outflow report and Report Guide
The HPP Report | 3. By-Name Lists report and Report Guide
Our CHR vs. CAEH webinar recording
Using HIFIS for the Community Homelessness Report (CHR) webinar recording
Slides for our COR Report: What to Expect presentation
Note that the Community Homelessness Report (CHR) is officially discontinued, so I can’t find any documentation on it. You shouldn’t use it, but it is there in your HIFIS Report Manager under “Reaching Home Community Outcomes.”
So What’s a Community To Do?
Don’t panic. There’s definitely some of you out there who have a headache by this point in my blog post, but don’t despair, there is something you can do.
Have good data.
I didn’t say it was an easy thing to do, but it is something within your control.
For example:
Clients with Unknown housing status really affect your inflow/outflow reports. Some communities have 40% or more current clients with Unknown housing status, which means that whatever numbers you’re reporting on could be off by 40%. If you didn’t have any clients with Unknown housing status, you wouldn’t need to worry if one report handles Unknowns differently from another.
Clients who have Declined consent also are a big issue. This might not feel like it’s within your control, but let me tell you that I’ve worked with some communities with 1% of clients declining consent and other communities with 25% declining consent. There’s more than one way to think about consent, and if you are on the higher end of that scale, it could be that some service providers in your community haven’t really bought into the idea of coordinated access and are conveying a siloed attitude towards their clients. Or something else. But it is possible to get informed consent from most of the people experiencing homelessness.
Make sure staff are recording the services they provide accurately. If you have staff infrequently updating HIFIS with how they’re assisting clients, then you’re likely going to have clients either becoming inactive when they shouldn’t be, or not becoming inactive when they should be.
Here’s a place you can start. Try running the HIFIS Health Check, which will give you a high-level overview of what kind of issues might be impacting your inflow/outflow reports.
Of course, maintaining good quality data about homelessness is an uphill battle. Whenever we can, we advocate for HIFIS improvements that will allow for better data (and you can too!). You might have good data quality this month, but then get distracted by a separate major project and come back six months later to find the data quality has significantly diminished.
The best things you can do in your community is try to instill an appreciation for data. Nobody likes data entry, but if staff can see that having good data leads to better outcomes for their clients, a clearer picture of homelessness in your community, and a greater ability to identify and address service gaps, they might begrudgingly begin to see the importance of documentation and data quality.
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