Missoula, Montana

Building for sustainability: by-name data quality policies and procedure

After joining the Built For Zero (BFZ) movement in July of 2022, Missoula steadily worked towards achieving single adults quality data and reached the milestone in June of 2023. To achieve and maintain continuous data quality, Missoula is regularly strengthening its processes to monitor and improve the city’s by-name data (BND). This allows Missoula to effectively use data to improve systems and measure progress toward the city’s goals to reduce and end homelessness. 

Before the quality data process

Missoula, a small city in western Montana, is part of the Montana statewide Continuum of Care (CoC). The city of Missoula manages their local coordinated entry system (called MCES). Before joining BFZ, the HMIS lead agency primarily monitored Missoula’s data quality as part of larger CoC efforts including federal reporting.

As part of the process to achieve quality data, the Missoula BFZ team expanded their existing coordinated entry policies and procedures and developed a by-name data operations manual (find it on the [TEXT: By-Name Data Management Manual, LINK: By-Name Data Management > Tool] page of the toolkit) with the support of their BFZ coaches. The manual allowed Missoula to document transparent procedures and policies to promote the use and maintenance of a comprehensive, secure, and accurate by-name dataset. Samantha Hilliard and Dylan Barbash from the City of Missoula Community Development Division highlighted the benefits of consolidating information into a single resource. They explained that this approach not only fostered a stronger sense of accountability but also encouraged shared ownership of processes. By creating a living document that is reviewed and updated annually, they have been able to refine their practices continuously. This process, they noted, has led to clearer, more effective, and more consistent implementation. The development of the manual also helped Missoula complete the policies and procedures section of the single adults scorecard, which requires communities to:

• Document clear roles and responsibilities for data entry and monitoring
• Document clear expectations for timeliness and frequency of data updates, and
• Demonstrate that data is being continuously monitored. 

Liam Seymour from the Poverello Center shared that, from a provider’s perspective, the process of creating the BND Operations Manual prompted a thorough review and improvement of their processes, ensuring alignment across the team. He added that it also instilled greater confidence in their data.

Leveraging the BFZ Wellsky reports  

After completing the scorecard and achieving quality data, Missoula’s data work continued to strengthen, in part, by utilizing the WellSky BFZ report suite. Historically, the BFZ data lead, who is the City of Missoula’s Coordinated Entry Specialist, pulled by-name data solely from the coordinated entry project in HMIS. However, with the introduction of the BFZ WellSky reports, they had an opportunity to expand what data was included in the by-name dataset. The new reports allowed them to see who was experiencing literal homelessness across all HMIS data, not just those enrolled in coordinated entry. 

After starting to use the reports, the Missoula data workgroup found that their active homeless number was nearly double what they were capturing in coordinated entry, and the majority of this discrepancy was due to data quality. This realization presented a direct need for the development of more robust data monitoring to achieve their goals of both identifying who in their system was not connected to coordinated entry and transitioning from their current and more burdensome reporting process to using the BFZ WellSky reports to track the BFZ metrics. With this insight, the data team started to leverage their BFZ WellSky reports to implement additional data-monitoring practices. 

In response, the data team developed user-friendly data-monitoring reports customized for providers that included instructions for correcting key data errors, explanations for why each data check is important, and the client-level details that need to be reviewed. To help reduce the burden on providers, they decided to focus on top-priority data quality checks that they felt would have the biggest impact on their by-name data quality, including: 

• Addressing missing dates of birth.
• Rectifying when individuals associated with households that did not have a designated head of household
• Reviewing if individuals enrolled in a provider’s project but not coordinated entry were still experiencing literal homelessness. 
• Reviewing individuals enrolled in a housing project with no housing move-in date recorded. 

The community’s custom data-monitoring reports are created using data from the case conferencing report in the BFZ WellSky Report suite and sent to providers on a monthly basis. As a result, the data team started to see the impacts. The number of people actively experiencing homelessness decreased as providers began to clean up their data and create a more accurate list of people experiencing literal homelessness. Viewing an example of this data-monitoring report shows a provider who initially needed to address over 250 corrections. However, within several months of implementing this process, the number of corrections was reduced to a dozen or fewer. 

Overall, updating these customized provider reports monthly has significantly enhanced the accuracy and timeliness of data entry. 

Continuous improvement and small tests of change

As the data clean-up efforts continued, the data team brainstormed how to make the process even more effective and less burdensome for providers. This resulted in the idea of implementing a small test of change to their existing coordinated entry HMIS workflow. 

The workflow change aimed to leverage work already happening as part of coordinated entry: tracking and monitoring inactivity. Missoula had existing robust procedures to follow up with folks who were soon to become inactive. The process includes providers making multiple contact attempts after an individual has not had a service entered into HMIS in 60 days, with a final contact attempt being made as part of the case conferencing process. After 90 days have passed with no recorded service in HMIS, coordinated entry staff would then go into HMIS and exit the individual from the coordinated entry project. The data team found that these individuals were often not exited from their other enrolled projects after the community confirmed they were inactive. 

The test of change targeted this process. With approval from the key providers coordinated entry staff exited individuals who were confirmed to be inactive from the provider’s project at the same time they were exited from coordinated entry. This new process added very little work to coordinated entry staff since they were already closing out enrollments in HMIS and it reduced the administrative burden for the provider. After testing this process with providers who opted in, they found it to be successful in helping them accelerate their data clean-up efforts. Sara Berndt from VOA also shared that one improvement was adding to the case conferencing document the procedures for reaching out to veterans at risk of being moved to inactive status, which made it much easier to put the procedures into practice consistently.

Utilizing coalitions for better data quality

The City of Missoula continues to find ways to improve, including incorporating data management into its strategic plan to end veteran homelessness. As part of this strategic plan, the data team created a document outlining the HMIS data points critical to measuring the city’s overall progress to functional zero. The goal of the document is to signal and create buy-in around the importance of accurate and timely data entry in their coalition’s shared work. It also was designed to be simple and focus on what data was critical for tracking accurate data on a monthly basis. 

The data team presented this document to the larger Missoula improvement team. As a result, key veteran and non-veteran providers are now sharing it with their organizations to establish an ongoing commitment to by-name data management. This document was initially effective in building buy-in and sustaining data entry practices. It has also remained useful to review in cases where programs struggle to maintain data standards.

Missoula continues strengthening and adapting its processes to continuously improve by-name data quality. This case study reflects these processes as of June 2024. If you would like to know more, please contact bfzdatasupport@community.solutions.