Being a Balance of State implementation, it is very difficult to get a handle on which providers are doing what, are funded by whom, etc. Prior to learning about Provider assessments, I never really saw a way of keeping all that straight. The first time I ever heard of Provider assessments, I was at a Bowman conference attending a session presented by an HMIS admin from Maine who was presenting on an ART report he had built. It came up because someone had asked him how he’d been able to separate providers based on an object that is not tracked anywhere in the Provider Admin. He said he’d added the question to his Provider Assessment and showed it to us. I was FLOORED. I did not even wait to get back to the office to create a provider assessment for our implementation. Here are some of the things we track with our provider assessment:
Homeless Planning Region – our Balance of State is divided up into 18 regions for planning purposes. Each provider belongs to a region, and this is where we record each provider’s region. This prevents me having to use the County field in the Address data objects to divide the providers into their regions.
Homeless Dedicated? – some of the providers entering data into our HMIS are not homeless dedicated, and this is important as to whether or not we want them showing on our Housing Inventory Chart (HIC).
APR Year Start (and End) – these dates are really only there for the month and day so that we can know when the provider’s fiscal year is. This helps us know when to send reminders about APRs that are almost due.
Notes – sometimes there are just things to know about a particular provider. This is where we put that.
CoC Funded? – for some reports, we only want the CoC-funded providers to show.
While there are definitely more questions that could be added, we definitely do not take adding another question to it lightly, because we generally have to go through 400 records to answer them all if the data is going to be of any use. There are some fields (like CoC Funded?) that are only answered if they are NOT CoC funded. I just have to code my reports to look for No’s and exclude those instead of reporting on all the Yes’s. This saves us a lot of data entry but still gets the job done.
The way to set up a provider assessment is exactly like setting up any assessment, but you have to make the Type “Provider Record”. Everything from there on is the same as setting up a Client Assessment. Once you are done setting up the provider and assigning it to the providers you want to have it, you have to go into each provider, go to the Assessments tab, assign the assessment, then go to the Assessment Display Settings, and go to the very bottom where it will show the Provider Assessment Display and there is where you pick your new assessment and tell it to show in the Provider Admin for that provider. Once you have it all done, you should be able to pull up the provider in Provider Admin and see the Provider Assessment tab.
I highly recommend using the Provider assessment to help with custom reporting! What are some questions you have added (or are going to add) to your provider assessment?