Coordinated entry provides benefits to participants, housing providers and other human services agencies. Coordinated entry furthers your community’s goal in ending homelessness and poverty.

For clients, coordinated entry simplifies and expedites access to housing and to services. Your selected assessment tool matches clients to available and appropriate housing and services, eliminating the need for clients to individually contact separate providers.

For providers, coordinated entry ensures referred clients are screened for eligibility. Coordinated entry leverages your outreach efforts to more effectively reach vulnerable populations and to reduce duplicative efforts.

Through community wide data collection, coordinated entry allows for a more complete picture of homelessness and poverty in your community.

Coordinated entry is designed to achieve the mandate included in the HEARTH Act that every Continuum of Care create a coordinated or centralized assessment and placement system that prioritizes access to housing and services.

Not necessarily. Each Continuum of Care is responsible to craft policies, including what to do with existing waitlists. In consultation with providers, a Continuum should adopt written procedures on their plan to transition from existing wait lists to coordinated entry using a phased in approach. Providers should then communicate to all clients on existing wait lists, informing them on the transition to coordinated entry, explaining the assessment, prioritization and placement process.

HUD recommends privacy protections as part of the minimum criteria for effective implementation of a coordinated assessment process. Each Continuum is responsible for issuing security standards policies and procedures. For more on this topic: https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/hmis/hmis-data-and-technical-standards/#privacy

A referral forwarded via HOME (CTA’s app for collecting client assessments) does not include the specific responses or information gathered by the assessor. Confidential and private information is securely stored and is accessible only to authorized individuals.

CTA and Alexandria Consulting are experienced in performing community and HMIS data integration. Alexandria has written HUD XML Schema and co-written HUD CSV data formats and extensions for HUD, and has successfully performed many integrations using both formats, along with Health Level 7 payload. Alexandria has collaborated with ServingLynk to build an Open Source enterprise HMIS Warehouse with complete API coverage.

CTA has led and implemented many integration tasks within its areas of operation. CTA built and runs a data warehouse that can perform two-way synchronizations between an HMIS vendor and HMIS participating agencies, using HMIS XML or APIs.

We have micro-services for matching clients with a Master Patient Index, for matching housing opportunities and for notifications. Micro-services interact with each other through APIs so the messages between services are discrete and isolated. Services can be mixed and matched to flexibly accommodate your needs. All services share a single PostgreSQL RDBMS (which can have many nodes to scale) for consistency and rapid access to operational data by APIs.

You may run this collection of micro-services on your own premises, on enterprise cloud account you own, or have it hosted by CTA/HMISLynk. It’s your choice, and one or any subset of micro-services could be hosted in different locations.