As communities and Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) vendors continue to work through the Longitudinal Systems Analysis (LSA) data cleaning process, HUD wants to acknowledge how challenging this process has been and thank our partners for continuing to work with us and the LSA team. We set a high bar for the LSA submission process more than 12 months ago, and while the process is continuing to move forward, it has had quite a few bumps along the way, resulting in extensions, confusion and frustration for our community partners and HMIS vendors. Although it’s been a challenging process for all of us, we are heartened to see that HMIS system administrators and vendors have stayed engaged, continued to show up to office hours and continued working with our LSA team to find and resolve issues.
The LSA is one of the most important data improvement efforts happening within our field. This data upload will allow communities to understand their system performance in more meaningful ways and drive critical improvements. Through HUD’s new strategy and analysis tool—Stella—every Continuum of Care (CoC) will be able to upload their LSA data regularly and identify the parts of their system most negatively (and positively) affecting overall system performance. Because of the way the LSA is structured, CoCs will be able to upload data for sub-CoC geographies to drive more targeted improvements across large CoC areas.
HUD will continue to support HMIS vendors and the LSA team to resolve programming issues, so that your CoC will have an LSA upload that is as accurate as possible. This part of the process is taking more time than anticipated, and as such, HUD is extending the LSA submission date further and will announce a new submission date when we have a better sense of when most vendors can produce a clean LSA upload. We anticipate that deadline to be in early May but will announce new dates after some of the current technical challenges have been addressed. We don’t anticipate the Housing Inventory Count (HIC) & and Point-in-Time (PIT) Count Data and System Performance Measures Report deadlines to change.
Finally, we want to be clear that we are keenly aware of CoCs’ concerns with respect to the LSA timeline as it relates to the CoC Competition, and we are taking into consideration the unexpected delays and upload issues.
Thank you for all the hard work that you do to end homelessness in your community every day.
HUD’s Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs
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