Who is your agency's Designated Contact for HMIS?
According to the HMIS Policies, each participating agency must have at least one person acting as the "Designated Agency HMIS Contact". To date, ICA has not been actively monitoring adherence to this policy expectation - we haven't been actively tracking who this is for each agency when joining HMIS nor requesting agencies to re-affirm it regularly. The transition into a new software platform presents a important opportunity to lift this policy back up. This fall, ICA will ask that each agency formally notify us of who their designated contact is and re-set on shared expectations for that role.
As currently written, this person carries the following responsibilities:
Updates to agency information including changes to projects and users
Understanding of and compliance with data collection/reporting requirements
Make sure each user has their own licenses and only after they have received training
Notify ICA of any violations of policies/procedures
Starting this fall, we anticipate updating this description within the HMIS Policies to also include (examples, this is not formalized language):
Serve as agency liaison should ICA learn of a user or privacy violation, including coordination of agency-side tasks in the event a client's data has had unauthorized access
Read and process all ICA newsletters and statewide communications and route internally as relevant
Monitor users for completion of ongoing training requirements
Disseminate any changes to HMIS Policies that are relevant to specific staff within the agency.
Amplify messaging around data quality activities
Affirm annually who holds this role for the agency
Agencies would do well to consider internally which position within your organization should hold this responsibility. There is not a formal action needed at this time. ICA will reach out to all agencies this fall to formally document who the designated HMIS contact is.