How Your HMIS Data Helps People Experiencing Homelessness: A data matching project to monitor COVID-19 vaccine distribution trends

We want to make our users aware of the important ways HMIS data is used to support people experiencing homelessness and to plan for an end to homelessness in Minnesota.

ICA recently completed a project with the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Health, that provided data from HMIS to researchers interested in tracking COVID-19 immunization among populations experiencing homelessness. Their goal is to ensure people experiencing homelessness are adequately and rapidly receiving the COVID-19 vaccine across Minnesota.

This project demonstrated the value of HMIS data in supporting public health efforts to reach persons experiencing homelessness with the COVID-19 vaccine and also highlighted real-world impact of HMIS data quality. Because this project matched HMIS data with information from other data systems, more complete records result in more matches across systems. In this case, better HMIS data quality could lead directly to better health outcomes for persons experiencing homelessness.

An important note: the ICA team and the research team partners took care to make sure all the information coming out of HMIS was protected and to limit the use of this information to only the goals of the research project.

Your HMIS data entry makes this kind of project possible. Thank you for all the work you do to enter complete and accurate data in HMIS!