ICA Cleaning Up Client Location Fall 2020
As you know, or in case you missed this or this, Client Location is an important data element universally collected for all heads of household. This data element is so important, in fact, that a handful of very important reports say if this data element is missing altogether or incongruent with the HMIS provider's CoC, to EXCLUDE the household from the data set. This means, if Client Location is incorrect, the entire household's stay at a project will be excluded as if it never happened. As of today, Minnesota has an error rate under 3% for Client Location for FFY19 and FFY20.
In Minnesota, the CoC you select for this data element has a 1-to-1 relationship with your provider's set CoC. An easy way for you to check which CoC is set for your project is to look at your provider name in HMIS.
Provider: Agency A Test-ES-RCC-DHS OEO-ESP-Men's Shelter (5500)
Client Location: MN-501 Ramsey Provider: Agency B Test-ES-HCC-HUD-ESG-Night-by-Night (3400) Client Location: MN-500 HCC
At Project Start when you create a new Entry Record in the Entry/Exit tab, confirm this data element's response matches your provider's CoC and update the response if it does not.
For households that have one Entry record or multiple Entry records for the same CoC, clean-up is straightforward (go into the Entry Assessment and select the correct Client Location). These errors will get picked up as part of your data quality review processes at your agency, including Minnesota's Quarterly Data Quality process.
For households that have more than one Entry record in multiple CoCs and require Client Location to toggle back and forth, clean-up can get complex quickly due to the downstream effects of corrections. This is most complex for households that stay with our large, night-by-night shelters. As such, ICA staff helped correct errors to the Client Location data element for HUD data clean-up and saw error rates drop by over 10% for shelters. We developed a data correction process that allows us to quickly address Client Location errors, this process is currently only available to ICA as your State System Administrator.
WHAT? ICA is going to assist Minnesota in cleaning up the Client Location data element.
WHY? If the Client Location data element is missing or incongruent, the entire household's project stay will be excluded from the Longitudinal System Analysis (LSA) and System Performance Measures (two huge reports submitted to HUD). As of today, Minnesota has a %% error rate for Client Location for 10/1/2018 - 9/30/2020. WHY ICA? Retroactive clean-up of this data element can get complex quickly due to the downstream effect of corrections for households that are served in more than one CoC. Where clean-up of one household may require multiple agencies reviewing the client record multiple times, ICA can address all errors in one swoop.
WHICH PROJECTS? While pie in the sky is to clean-up every single error, our priorities will be:
Households that have stays in project types pulled into the LSA and SPMs (list them out).
Households that stay in more than one CoC during the report period.
WHEN? Our hope is to finish up our clean-up efforts by the end of October. Due to the ongoing work, you may see that some errors in QDQ reports will be resolved.
CAN I HELP?
The best support you can provide is minimizing the necessity for mass clean-up in the future by reviewing Client Location every time you create a new Entry record. Confirm this data element's response matches your provider's CoC and update the response if it does not! Also, be sure to participate in Minnesota's Quarterly Data Quality process to review your data entry on a quarterly basis.