Rapid Rehousing Analysis III (How Rapid is Rapid?)

This is the third in a series of blog posts I'm doing about the custom reports we have been using to analyze Rapid Rehousing data to ensure that our Rapid Rehousing projects are being used to their fullest. We focus this time on another piece of our Quarterly Performance Report (the latest is here: http://cohhio.org/files/Quarterly%20Performance%20Report%202016%20Q2.pdf) called Rapid Placement.

Our particular goal is 21 days or less, but this will vary from CoC to CoC. Coding this piece of the report was really easy, but because the Move-In Date data element was new when we started using the data, there was a LOT of unreliable data because it was not widely understood what the difference between the Entry Date and the Move-In Date is for Rapid Rehousing. So I added the "Reliable?" column so that anyone looking at the report could quickly tell what data was meaningful and what data to ignore for now. (See Figure 1.)

After adding the field to our custom Data Quality report, it got a little better, but I think the main reason it has seen such an improvement is because it was added to the QPR as a measure that is being monitored and really says a lot about how successful a Rapid Rehousing project is.

Figure 1: Report is sorted by how reliable the data is.

The projects with unreliable data sometimes have Move-In Dates that precede Entry Dates, or they seem to be housing everyone within one day of entering the project. It is definitely possible to house a client in one day, but it is highly unlikely that it is happening on such a regular basis that the average or mean would be "1" or "0". So these projects would just need to run their Data Quality reports to get those dates sorted out. The "Reliable?" column then, checks for averages or means that are less than or equal to 1.

The other projects that actually have clients are all marked as "Possibly" reliable since, even though their averages and means look ok, we can't be sure the data is completely accurate. Now that we have been doing this for some time, it is probably time to just change that to "Yes" on those, as our RRH projects have GREATLY improved their data on Move-In Date over the past year. In 2015 when we started measuring this, most projects had unreliable data and now it's only 16%!

Of the projects with reliable data, only 56% of them are meeting the 21 day goal, however, this is an improvement over last year's 39%, and that is the main goal here.

Adding this simple measure to the QPR was a difficult decision because the data looked so awful in the beginning, but doing it has not only improved the data but also has gotten more providers to the point where they are achieving the 21-day goal.