I can't believe I don't already have something on this ideas board about this! Here's the idea, in more detail:

In a perfect world, we have 100% complete housing-related data about all clients at all times. But we do not live in a perfect world, and there are frequently gaps in each client's history. For example: a client books out of shelter on Tuesday and back into shelter on Thursday, and staff may not remember to/get a chance to/prioritize asking them where they were for the one missing night and add a Housing History for the one night.

However, we can logically assume that if someone was homeless on Tuesday and homeless on Thursday, they were probably also homeless on Wednesday as well. Why? Well, if they were housed, they definitely weren't stably housed because they were back in homelessness the next day. And if we really wanted to record the housing attempt, we could manually enter the one-day period of housing via Housing History.

Therefore, we should be able to infer that if there are two known periods of homelessness with a short enough gap in between the periods, then that was really just one longer period of homelessness. In addition, the gap, the missing days, should count towards chronicity.

We propose: creating a setting in HIFIS called "Unknown Gap Threshold" (we have used the term "grace period" in the past). This should be a number of days. Potentially, 7 could be used as a default, but this could be changed by communities. If there are two periods of the same Housing Status with an unknown period in between that is less than the Unknown Gap Threshold, the client's Housing Status should not change during that period.

In other words, the following scenario:

1. Homeless June 1 - June 7

2. Unknown June 7 - June 8

3. Homeless June 8 - June 12

Would be recorded in the client Housing Status changes table as:

1. Homeless June 1 - June 12

The impacts of this proposed change would be as following:

• Fewer overall records in the Client History Changes, which would decrease loading time

• Fewer overall transitions in the COR report, particularly in the Homeless to Unknown and Unknown to Homelessness metrics, which are meaningless chaff which take away from the important metrics

• More accurate calculations of chronicity, which would include the unknown gaps between known homelessness. This would likely increase chronically homeless numbers, but it would be more accurate

• Improved ease-of-use when prioritizing clients. Fewer clients with Unknown Housing Status overall means that the Unknown Housing Status indicator actually means something: "we actually don't know where this client has been in the past week" instead of "actually they just booked out of shelter this morning and will probably be back"

• Decreased burden on staff who might currently be pressured to fill in the short gaps between known periods of homelessness, allowing them to focus on more important measures

Unanswered questions:

• Should this setting also apply to scenarios where a client has two different housing statuses, with a gap in between? For example, Homeless > Unknown > Housed?