ART Reports Impacted by October 1 HUD Data Standards

Due to the 10/1/19 HUD data standards changes implemented by Wellsky last week, a high volume of ICA Minnesota reports have bugs. This is temporary and our Reporting & Evaluation team is working steadfastly to resolve these issues. Read on to learn what, why, and how you can stay up-to-date on the resolution of each impacted report.

In this article, we'll describe the scope of what's effected, what we're doing about it, and how you can determine if your report is ok.

What happened?

With the late release of Wellsky's system changes and technical specifications, ICA Minnesota was able to dig into the changes and impact late last week. While we anticipated our reports would be impacted, the exact extent couldn't be predicted until vendor release notes were in hand.

Based on WellSky's initial communications, we anticipated an opportunity to fully test changes beginning mid-September. Due to delays, we did not have the opportunity to preview and test these in advance, as changes were only made available on the evening of 10/1/2019. Over the next three days, we were in a holding pattern as ART failed to refresh. On Friday, our ART rebuild was successful and we were finally able to test and assess the system changes on our reports.

Unfortunately, due to the structure of these changes, you will likely encounter report bugs when running reports this week.

What in my reports are impacted?

The following widely used data elements underwent changes:

• 3.917 Prior Living Situation

  • Chronic Homelessness

  • Residence Prior

  • Disability

  • Exit Destination

How will that look?

They will not flag as errors, but the quality of the data will be temporarily affected. For reports where these fields are present, responses will appear missing that are not, in fact, missing. In turn, the summary counts for these fields will be inaccurate until report revisions are made.

• Chronic Homelessness: increased count of missing, falsely reduce count

• Disability: broader definition not yet applied

• Residence Prior: increased count of missing

• Exit Destination: increased count of missing

ICA Minnesota is triaging quickly; this will be our Reporting & Evaluation team's top priority this week.

How can I know that the report I need to use is ok?

We're on it! We updated our REPORTcollection to show you what's ok, what needs to be revised, and what has been revised.

Within the REPORTcollection, we've added a column titled FFY2020 Changes. If it says "Ok" or "Resolved", you're good to go! If it says "In Review " "Revision Needed" or "Hold for Research", then know that there are changes coming.

We'll keep this updated in real time as we release these updates.

Before you contact the Helpdesk, check this list and be sure you're using the most up-to-date report version (re: not a report scheduled from your ART inbox).

Thank you for your understanding as we work to rectify these issues.