How are data imports and permissions managed in HomelessData.com?

HomelessData.com grants permissions based on who has imported data, and who is granted access by a Data Source or Organization Administrator. If you do an automated import, then you will have access to all of the data for that project both historically and going forward as the system assumes that the permissions carry over at the project level.

If you are granted reporting access to an Organization or Project within a Data Source, you will be able to see data from that organization or project, regardless of who imported it. You are able to run reports over all data that you have access to.This feature allows staff to collaborate more effectively and “leverage” each other’s work to reduce redundant work.

HomelessData.com allows users to run reports over distinct imports, over a particular organization or project, or over all of the data available to that user. Each import of data updates to records from that particular project, allowing users to continually maintain a bank of fresh data. As people can access data that they did not import, this feature also ensures that a complete history of each client is refreshed with each import, regardless of who completed the action.

In this image, you see the drop-down options to select the Datasource and Import ID as well as the organization and project. If these fields are blank, the report will be run over all of the data available.

Some of the advantages are:

• Staff can leverage each other’s work. HMIS administrators can periodically refresh the data and all users will have fresh data to work with.
• Approach allows for HomelessData.com to support multiple HMIS and non-HMIS data exchange formats simultaneously.
• Can build a “longitudinal picture” of a person’s experience with the homeless system over time.
• With fresh data available, reports can eventually be set to run on a pre-defined schedule. For example, if an APR report is due on May 1 then a report could be set to run on April 1 and sent to designated staff for review.
• Data dashboards and by-name prioritization lists require the data to be constantly refreshed. A single database that can be refreshed by multiple users, and/or be refreshed through automated data exchange, allows for this.

NOTE: Since the database contains a cumulative picture of homelessness for each project within a region, it is important that all historical data for a project to be imported into HomelessData.com. We encourage administrators to pre-populate HomelessData.com with data starting on October 1, 2012 to present to include the initial “look back” period for HUD’s System Performance Measures. While this initial export may take a while longer, each subsequent refresh can cover just the interval of time since the last update.