Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Post

Transcript

Hi, LA County. I'm Bevin Kuhn, Deputy Chief Analytics Officer here at Lisa. And I'm Chelsea Madigan, Director of Interim Housing with NASA. And we're here today to talk about some exciting changes coming to our interim housing system. We're launching an inventory module that will help us track interim housing beds in real time across the county. I worked as a service provider for seven years operating interim housing sites, and it was really tough to track occupancy data. Every provider is doing it differently. And if we're thinking about the system, we have 22,000 beds plus the manual. An outdated system that we were using is just not appropriate. There are no there's no specificity on what type of bed was being tracked when they were available. So this inventory module will help to change that. Yeah, I saw the same thing when I was the provider. And that's why when new leadership came to LASA, we really hit the ground running, wanting to implement change and not uphold the status quo to really drive the system towards housing people faster and more efficiently. So we started working on this immediately in August of 2023, designing what we wanted, the interim housing. Module to look like we needed to know what types of beds we wanted, what types of eligibility ADA compliant beds motel congregate non congregate hearing accessibility, visual accessibility so many different types exactly kitchens for families right and what type of bathroom is There's so many things when you think about collecting all this room so we needed to design a system that could track all of that. On top of that we had our encampment resolution efforts starting which we're putting people into motels as we know and hotel providers have really sophisticated software that they use to check. People in and out and we needed that. We did. We really needed that and we didn't have that here. So we had to design that, which is why we actually launched this with our encampment resolution motels back in January so we could see how this system can best work to support these programs. The best part about the system, Kelsey, is it's built in HMIS, or Homeless Management Information System, which is where our providers are already using to track all of their data and client care notes. So they don't have to learn a new system, they just have to use the same database that they've already been using with an enhancement that will make. To work a lot easier and some of those enhancements are that providers will have access to real time data for occupant occupied beds, active beds, offline beds, and we're able to see what beds are ready at what specific time. Also, what's really amazing is that not only will the outreach worker or the case manager be notified who sent in the interim housing referral, but the participant will also be notified as well when they're matched to a bed. So this cuts down the time that an outreach worker, case manager is spending out on the street or calling the participant. Their emergency contacts to find them to connect them to this interim housing. Also for winter shelter. Do you want to talk about what the new update is? Yeah, outreach workers can go in and in HMIS they can see a map of all available shelters, winter shelters, and they can see what winter shelters closest to where they are and how many beds they have available available. So they can go ahead and just bring their client to that location and get them into bed that night. That's pretty awesome. Another cool thing is about matching. Do you want talk about matching participation? So the prioritization expectations. They're built directly into the bed inventory module, so we have prioritization categories where a participant can be matched based on their specific needs to a beds that are available that would match their needs based on priority. Yeah, and right now it's a really manual process. You have a whole list of participants, You have all of these eligibility and location requirements to get people into beds, and that's all done manually with people kind of filtering these lists. What we're going to do with this module is we're going to let the computer think for us. So we're going to let the computer do all that hard matching so that we can. Really focus on making sure that the system is working efficiently, making sure that our participants are getting the best care, and turning our attention where it is most needed to move people into housing faster, which is really cool. Awesome. Yeah. And a really important part of this rollout and this new module is the training we're going to provide. LASA has a centralized training Academy where we'll have trainings available for all of the providers about how this system works. Will also be doing a lot of live trainings. In addition to that, both of our teams are really going to come together, our interim housing and our data, as they always do and as we. Have been and really make sure that we're holding the providers accountable that we're giving them the resources and that they're holding us accountable as well to make sure that we're supporting them in this rollout so we can really maximize the system what we want this to be is just a simple as easy as process as possible to capture what beds are available when they aren't and if they aren't why and so we can really do targeted get better understanding and as a data nerd I'm really excited about this because all of this information is going to be available in our. Dashboards. You know, we've rolled out a lot of dashboards in the past few months, some available publicly to our elected officials, to our policymakers, to our system leads, and to all the providers so we can really understand what's working and what's not working. Why does this site have so many offline beds? Because they had to. Needed a lot of repairs, right? And so we can then make sure we're deploying the support and really have the insight we need to make system change in a positive direction, which is really cool. As I said in the beginning, Kelsey, we're all about innovation and change here at NEWASA. We've been that way since day one when we got here. We've been hitting the ground running. This project has been a long time coming, but we're really excited about the new system's potential to move people into housing faster. Yeah. So stay tuned For more information about the changes that are being made to LASA and the rehousing systems and homelessness in LA County.