In order to provide more effective services to people in Santa Clara County who are struggling to get out of homelessness, the service providers have joined together to implement HMIS. The goals are to gain a greater understanding of the scope, needs and resources available to populations at risk in Santa Clara County.

Community Technology Alliance, as the lead HMIS agency for the Santa Clara County Collaborative on Affordable Housing and Homelessness issues, is implementing ServicePoint software to handle HMIS for the county. The HMIS Project planning process began in 2002, and the first agencies on board began collecting data in January of 2004. 

Community Techonolgy Alliance's role includes development of a unified countywide system, creating a common intake form, developing policies and procedures for information sharing and client confidentiality, and ensuring best practices are shared with other counties where appropriate. In addition, we are managing the end-to-end technology solution, including choice of a technology platform, designing project infrastructure, hosting and maintaining HMIS hardware and software, and assisting partners in successful implemenation within their organizations.

As a result of the HMIS initiative, Community Technology Alliance is helping nonprofit agencies in Santa Clara County to:

• Deliver integrated services to unhoused and at-risk residents of the community.
• Relieve families and individuals of the burden of repeating information before receiving services.
• Provide information to support coordinated responses to organizations such as the Continuum of Care.
• Monitor how homeless services are currently being used and identify gaps in service delivery.
• Identify and evaluate successful outcomes, and satisfy reporting requirements for funding.
• Provide an unduplicated count of those homeless residents recieving shelter, housing and services from participating agencies 
• Educate the community regarding the impact of poverty by providing up-to-date information about homeless issues.

For more information about Santa Clara County's HMIS, vist www.hmisscc.org.  For information about Santa Clara County's Collaborative on affordable housing and homeless issues, visit www.collabscc.org

In addition, Santa Clara County is participating in the Bay Area Counties Homeless Information Collaborative (BACHIC) which is currently facilitating a project to build a Regional Data Warehouse that will collect and report information from eleven Bay Area Continuums local HMIS implementations.  To find out more about this project, please visit: http://www.ctagroup.org and click on the project labeled "RHINO" under "Solutions" page/tab.