ICA revamped the General HMIS Instructions and Households How-To Guide to make them more comprehensive and easy to use, so be sure to check them out if you haven’t already! We used our most frequent Helpdesk questions to develop updated versions of these instructions that will be a helpful resource for all HMIS users. Like  … Read more

You asked for it, and it is here! Behold, the Minnesota HMIS Knowledge Base! You can find the Knowledge Base on our website under the Training and Support section. What is a Knowledge Base? It is a collection of some of our frequently asked questions with answers from the team at ICA. Everything is sorted  … Read more

As stated in our last newsletter, ICA is excited to release updated versions of our General HMIS Instructions and Households How-To Guide. Both of these documents are GREAT resources for all HMIS users. Check out the types of topics that are included in each document! General HMIS Instructions: Documenting the Release of Information (ROI) Statewide  … Read more

We have a new internal policy that requires, at minimum, two of the three fields to be an exact match prior to processing a merge request. First and Last Name SSN, and Date of Birth If two are an exact match, the third component cannot blatantly contradict the other (see the third example below). This  … Read more

Please register here for the Hennepin LSA DQ work session. This is a unique opportunity to work 1:1 on data quality for LSA that has you stumped! When: Monday November 5th, from 2:30-4:30pm Where: Sabathani Development Office 3737 3rd Ave S, Minneapolis 55409 Room 104 Please come with the data quality corrections needed sent by  … Read more

ICA is currently working on an exciting improvement to the Quarterly Data Quality Plan for Minnesota. A project is underway to completely re-design the Data Quality Plan that you once knew. Our focus will be to make the new Data Quality Plan as user-centric as possible and better align with standards and mandates from the  … Read more

HMIS ES and TH Projects Tomorrow, Friday, February 9th, is the data entry deadline for emergency shelter (ES) and transitional housing (TH) projects in HMIS. NOW –  to ensure your HMIS data is complete and error-free, all HMIS users with ES and TH project should run these two reports and make data corrections as necessary.  … Read more

Attention All ES, TH, and PSH Agencies: What? Each October since 2007, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launches the data collection process that becomes the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR). This is a nationwide estimate of households experiencing homelessness throughout 2016. To learn about the process, and your role, watch this 2017  … Read more

Common Causes of Poor Data Quality The previous installment in this series outlined the three most common causes of poor data quality: technical causes, human error, and organizational causes.[1] All of these factors are important to consider when trying to prevent and correct poor data quality, whether it is in HMIS or other internal databases  … Read more

Data entry accuracy is not only crucial to your agency, but with statewide data sharing, your data entry accuracy affects your community partners as well. Items to pay attention to include: Spelling of names and SSN; Adding SHARED to the Alias field for shared records so that when the next agency does their due diligence  … Read more