Interims and Follow Ups Implementation

Are you using Interims and Followups in your ServicePoint implementation? With the recent change HUD made to the CoC APR, instead of introducing the workaround offered up by Bowman, we decided to jump both feet first and just get Interims and Followups set up and implemented so that our users can have this tool.

Last week, we sent out the instructions and the email explaining to the users about the new APR, etc. We also finally finished setting up our providers today. The set up was very easy, though having to touch each of our 400 providers to set it up was pretty unwieldy.

Prior to set up, we had to make a few decisions. We edited the picklist called Review so that there were only two choices: Annual Review, and General Review. This picklist had a default list that went like “30 Day Review” and so on. We got rid of the #Day type defaults because 1. that field is not used in any HUD reporting anyway, and 2. how long after an Entry or Exit a Review happened wouldn’t be calculated using this field, it would be calculated using the Review Date – the Entry/Exit Date. So we couldn’t think of a good reason to keep those and went with the Keep It Simple model.

The other decision we had to make was what to collect at Interim and what to collect at Followup. We decided to create two separate assessments since they’re really different circumstances, and so that it would be easy to change one without changing the other in the future. Plus, there’s no need to collect some of the data during a program stay. Like updating Housing Status, for instance, would be meaningless during a program stay. Many of the questions ask about the client’s situation specifically at Entry. These wouldn’t work on an Interim assessment either. So it basically came down to Income and Non Cash questions and subassessments on the Interim assessment, and for the Followup assessment, we basically put the Universal Data Elements minus the more static data elements about a client, like DOB, Race, Ethnicity, etc.

Our last step in implementing this was adding a column for missing Interims on our modified version of the version 15 CoC APR. We basically keep two versions of every APR: one is the straight-up APR from Bowman as is, and the other has extra tabs in the back with separate blocks of a single column each that details the Client IDs for some calculation up in the front of the report. Many of these come from Question 7, where it calculates missing data. Others come from Question 18a, Disabilities, or Question 8, Households Only Children, Unknown Household Types, etc. You basically just have to copy the formula from whatever calculation you want to display and put it into a field on your back page by itself, and take out the “Count()” piece of the formula. You also usually have to tell it to look at the Client ID instead of the Unique Client ID. The formula I used for finding Missing Interims is:

1=[Inc Exit].[Entry Exit Client Id] 
2Where ([Inc Adj Interim] In([Inc Exit].[Entry Exit Client Id]) = -2 And 
3  [EE Leave or Stay]="S" And 
4  [EE LOS]>364)

Hope this helps someone out there! :)