HMISConnect

We Connect Human Services

Inspiration

The hackathon challenge relayed four major problems faced by existing HMIS systems. We picked on the emergency shelter problem since this involved something for both parties - the Continuum of Care (CoC) members and homeless community. Our inspiration has been the conversations we had during the Homelessness panel where all the panelist agreed that providing a safe shelter is the best way to get homeless individuals and families off the street and currently there are no mechanisms in place to let homeless know about which shelter to go for emergency shelter and vice versa. .

What it does

HMISConnect is a web and mobile application to help CoC members to get homeless individuals and families off the streets by finding open beds in emergency shelter. The web application lets CoC members streamlesslylook for open beds information not just in their shelter but throughout the CoC in the area using a dashboard. They can look up at the total availalbe beds in the CoC, do a new client checkin in their shelter, do a tentative checkin for a new client for another shelter initiating the checkin process. This process is completed only when the person goes to the appropriate shelter and complete the remaining checkin process, It provides a quick and easy form based mechanism to get a new homeless person in the system. The dashboard provides information related with the number of homeless served at the shelter and referred to others. It also shows the user messages, tasks and notifications. The application extracts and updates existing HMIS system in real time. The mobile app part of the HMISConnect application is focused towards the homeless trying to lookup for shelter information to meet their requirements. We use communication mechanism like SMS/email/mobile application notification to gather information proactively to understand homeless in emergency shelter need.

How we built it

HMISConnect system has many different components. The back-end system is built using MySQL open source database. This database extracts data from CoC's existing HMIS system and other external environments. The database has its own data model and stores locally. The front end web application system is built using Java Script, .Net, HTML, CSS while the Android app is built using Java

Challenges we ran into

The hackathon challenge mentioned about "to build a new HMIS system", this is a pretty daunting task for someone not familiar with the human services industry and build over a weekend. But listening through the opening ceremony and community panel discussions we were provided with sufficient information related with the CoC members in St Louis city and the homeless community in the area to calm our nerves. From a technology perspective the available dataset had a number of loopholes. But through experience, HUD HMIS guidelines documents and team discussions we were able to overcome them. Due to lack of user experience expertise on the team our biggest challenge in building the web and mobile application development were related with UI/UX but we were able to overcome the problem creatively.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the team work, effort and execution of the challenge. The team had detailed discussions on the all the four problems of the challenge. These brainstorming sessions were pretty intense but it was the idea's success was always our goals and our egos were kept in check.

What we learned

Human services challenges related to homelessness are screaming for attention. This hackathon has been a big eye opener related with some of these challenges being faced. The homeless shelters and homeless people have to undergo a lot of bureaucratic red tape and the existing information systems are quite inadequate to help. Technologies and software products that we use regularly are still decades away from these

What's next for HMISConnect

As part of this hackathon we focused on the emergency shelter problem of the challenge and build the HMISConnect to resolve this issue. The next steps would be to extend the application for other problems like prevention, electronic referral/data sharing and data visualization.