Knoxville’s TYP and community homeless service providers use a database called the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) to help measure the effectiveness of service delivery. HMIS also helps track the number of persons who get off the streets and into housing.
Homeless service providers are growing in their utilization of HMIS just as the system itself is being configured more and more precisely to meet the specific needs of our community. One of our major challenges is to make HMIS a normal part of the work for everyone involved in ending homelessness, and we’re making great strides towards that end.
There are, because of the fact that HMIS implementation is a work in progress, gaps in our knowledge of how many people who are chronically homeless have been placed in housing since the inception of the TYP. The staff at UT SWORPS, who administer HMIS, are working with the platform upon which HMIS is built to see if they can make the system do a better job of helping service providers answer this very important question.
HMIS shows that in all of 2008, providers in our community placed in housing 94 persons who had been chronically homeless. Because of variations in the ways those agencies utilize HMIS, and because of the fact that HUD doesn’t use the term “permanent supportive housing” in some of the compliance documents it requires recipients of HUD funding to use, but does use that term in some of its other documentation, it’s impossible to say precisely how many of those people went into permanent supportive housing. This number does represent placement in permanent housing as opposed to transitional, emergency shelter, detox, or some other impermanent housing mode.
Since the end of 2008, and through April 1, 2009, 24 persons who had been chronically homeless have been placed in housing as per the 2008 placements.