In Attendance: Judge Robert Fields, Michael Doherty, Charlie Knight, Nicole Desabrais, Pamela Schwartz, Lori Ingraham, Deborah Merkman, Gwen Gannon, Mary Orisich, Suzanne Smith
Data Integration – Suzanne updated the committee on integration efforts (combining data from three CoC’s into one integrated analytical database). Challenges are as follows:
State of Data/HMIS
- DHCD is moving from SHORE to Social Solutions
- Talk of merging CoC HMIS systems – meeting tomorrow in Northampton
- Changes from the HUD’s Data Standards from 2004 to 2010 went into effect in June. This involves reprogramming (actually just editing the code, and there were value changes on variables.) Three CoC’s are at various stages of making this change. This effects the format that datasets come in.
These changes are good news in that data collection can be more streamlined – it is moving in the right direction, it just means more time.
The goal is still a goal to have unduplicated counts – baseline to end of june, for leadership council meeting in July. Leadership Council needs as much real time information as possible.
Housing Court Data Collection Effort – The Housing court Record of Service form was revised in light of what has been learned in the process of entering the data from the forms. Judge Fields and Michael Doherty agreed to review changes and their rationales and then these will be explained to providers staffing the court.
Performance Measures – The Committee reviewed and discussed performance measures including trends in hotel numbers, shelter entries, family diversions and preventions and individuals housed through REACH efforts. Members made suggestions for changes in the way some charts were presented. Suzanne will send charts out to committee for any further feedback on what pieces of information are most important for the network to be communicating, particularly to the Leadership Council.
Update on Second Draft of Progress Report – The first draft of the “progress report” was presented to the Steering Committee, where there was significant discussion about the balance between the needs of various audiences – Leadership Council, Providers, Data Analysts, Media etc. This led to two subsequent meetings of a subgroup of the Steering Committee to follow up on these conversations so that work could be streamlined and short-term and long-term goals could be prioritized. This subgroup reviewed a list of measures to determine what they considered to be priorities (balanced with the length of time they would take to produce). These will be integrated into the progress report and prepared for the Leadership Council meeting in July. The measures considered were distributed to this data committee.
Next Meeting
Thursday August 19, 2010
1-2:30
Housing Court
37 Elm St., Springfield
