Greater
Hartford Coordinated Access Network
Leadership Committee Agenda
Wednesday,
July 18th, 2018
In Attendance:
Liany Arroyo – City of Hartford
Sonia Brown – CRT
Crane Cesario – CRMHC, DMHAS
Kate Chamberlin - CCEH
Stephanie Corbin – Mercy Housing and Shelter
Fred Faulkner – The Open Hearth
Heather Flannery – South Park Inn
Mollie Greenwood – Journey Home
Jen Greer - CHR
Daniel Langless – Beacon Health Options
Rebekah Lyas – ImmaCare
Steve MacHattie – Mercy Housing and Shelter
Matt Morgan – Journey Home
Lisa Quach – Journey Home
Lionel Rigler – City of Hartford
Amy Robinson – US Dept of Veteran Affairs
Iris Ruiz – Interval House
Zoe Schwartz – CRT
Barbara Shaw – Hands On Hartford
Kathy Shaw – My Sisters’ Place
Niya Solomon – Journey Home
Cathy Zeiner - YWCA
CT BOS COC Items
1. HUD Application – Application is
out. It seems like it may be easier than
previously for renewal applications.
Crane strongly recommends paying attention and read between the lines on
what isn’t coming out in written form.
a. Some of HUD’s language doesn’t
make sense. If you have questions or
concerns about your renewal evaluation, please let Crane know. We still don’t have guidance on merging.
GH
CAN Leadership Items
2.
Beacon Health Options – Dan Langless
a.
Beacon Health Option is also known as CT
Behavioral Health Options. Beacon is the
administrative services provider. All
Medicaid authorizations go through Beacon Health Options. There are a lot of different levels of care
provided for adults and children.
b.
Within the services that Beacon provides, they
have intensive care managers (licensed clinicians) who go out and meet directly
with Beacon’s members. Beacon also
employs peer specialists. There are ICMs
and peer specialists for both individuals and families. Beacon’s staff engages with folks who are
frequent users of medical services. In
Dan’s role, he deals a lot on a systems level.
On the way in, he was speaking with Barbara. They bring data out to the hospitals around
length of stay, readmission rates, discharge information completion rates.
c.
Beacon is also beginning to look more at
housing as healthcare. He wants to start
building stronger partnerships with providers around the homeless services
sector. Beacon Health Options wants to
be on the forefront of building these partnerships.
i. Hartford
Healthcare partnered with South Park Inn, and are funding 5 beds at South Park
Inn, and folks can do care plan transitions out of South Park Inn. It’s operating like a medical respite. It helps Hartford Healthcare reduce lengths
of stay.
1.
This program serves both individual men and
individual women.
2.
It’s being paid for by Hartford Hospital
directly, not by Medicaid dollars.
3.
St. Francis hospital is interested in doing a
similar model and partnering with a particular shelter or housing system.
4.
Yale has had a similar partnership with
Columbus House for several years.
5.
The Respite program has been operating for a
while, about a year. Heather encouraged
Crane to reach out to Jeff Katz. It’s
named “respite”.
ii. Dan’s
interested in getting out to each of the shelters in the next few months to
learn more.
iii. We want to
move this state to value-based payment, which would let Medicaid dollars
available for activities outside of treatment.
It would be a change from our current fee for service structure.
1.
Additional advocacy is needed, because this is
a change that would need to happen through the CT legislature.
a.
Liany said that the state has to ask for a
waiver and there has some reluctance in the past.
b.
Barbara Shaw sits on the Reaching Home Health
and Housing working group and there seems to be some forward momentum.
3.
SmartSheets Shelter Vacancy Updates – Rebekah
Lyas
a.
Rebekah noticed that the sheet wasn’t updating
the date that the change would be, to see that there are zero changes. It might look like Rebekah isn’t updating the
sheet for a week.
b.
There’s a larger issue though, where the list
has not been being updated daily.
Rebekah was not sure whether it was an ImmaCare-specific issue.
c.
Stephanie says that it appears to be a
secondary issue. It makes it very
challenging on the Diversion Center and on the Outreach Teams because if
information isn’t being reflected as a change.
Stephanie has been calling shelter to shelter to identify possible
changes. Stephanie isn’t sure if there’s
an issue coming from the shelter side in making updates. Every morning at ImmaCare folks know
immediately whether beds are available.
In theory the process is very simple, but it seems like it’s not
happening with good consistency.
d.
Waitlist Changes – Stephanie Corbin, Mollie
Greenwood
i. Last week
some folks from the Diversion Center and Kelly as a representative of outreach
came together to discuss some issues around the timing of the shelter
waitlist. We have some suggestions for
how to change and improve our process.
One suggestion is to only be calling shelters from Diversion if there
are no folks who are verified and not yet in.
Another suggestion is to only call the top cohort of folks on the
waitlist. All of these ideas are
challenging to implement because of reasons like having no phones, and like
outreach not being able to verify folks.
ii. What we’re
struggling with, if people are coming into Diversion and aren’t verified, it’s
becoming a little more of a judgment call.
This is in contrast with some of the folks who are being verified by
outreach workers and who aren’t climbing to the top of the list.
iii. There’s
some concern around making this process too high barrier by not ever relying on
self-report. It’s making it more
challenging to get folks into beds.
iv. Mollie ad
this to the next agenda for discussion!!!!
v. Family
Shelter Overflow Planning-
1.
We expect this to be very few and far between,
as a cohort who are being identified as literally homeless after hours. It’s a way to operationalize the fact that if
a family showed up, we would all be realistically taking them in that night and
trying to make a game-plan the next morning.
2.
We still have people on what’s being labeled
as the family waitlist. We have a cohort
of “families” who are on the waitlist, but where a head of household is
unsheltered and children are somewhere else.
4.
Chronically Homeless Households with Physical
Disabilities – Matt Morgan
a.
Over the last few weeks we’ve identified some
households who meet the chronic homeless criteria who have physical
disabilities. Many of our programs have
DMHAS funded services who are not being prioritized for the DMHAS-services
opening. We want to start thinking about
whether there’s a way to do any swapping and get people into the openings.
i. Is it
possible and feasible for us to swap someone out of the services? There were organizations who seemed
interested.
1.
Legacy shelter plus care programs from DMHAS
doesn’t have DMHAS funded services because they don’t have services attached to
certificates
2.
Efficiency units in Soromundi (which were
formally TLP units) aren’t DMHAS funded for services.
3.
HOPWA programs as well, in some instances
don’t have services that are DMHAS funded.
ii. We want to
think about whether it would be possible to do some kind of a switch.
1.
Mollie will send around a doodle poll to hold
a meeting related to this.
b.
BNL Outliers – Mollie Greenwood
i. Everyone
was reminded to make sure that the confidential information remains here.
ii. Went
through the four columns of folks who are looking at a very detailed
level. We’re doing a lot of work
simultaneously on working to show all the different categories of folks who
have historically been on our lists.
iii. We are
struggling as a community with folks who have been potentially chronically
homeless for a long time. We know they
have a long homeless history, but verification of disabling conditions is
taking a very long time.
5.
CAN Collaboration with Property Owner in CT–
Matt Morgan
a.
There’s a housing program on Vine Street,
named Horace Bushnell. In the past few
months, this property has been working with the National Alliance to End
Homelessness and CT Department of Housing and are interested in participating
with the GH CAN again.
b.
This committee approved Matt Morgan to sign an
MOU on behalf of the CAN to make these housing resources available for referral
by the housing matching teams.
6.
Progressive Engagement Framework – Mollie
Greenwood, Crane Cesario, Matt Morgan
a.
There have been a few statewide working groups
that have been looking at Progressive Engagement as a framework for our CANs to
operate. The goal of progressive
engagement is to provide light-touch services to as many people as possible,
and only increase the level of services if folks seem to need additional
assistance.
i. Jen’s
concern around Progressive Engagement is that when they’re housing chronically
homeless people, they’re looking at affordability, which is usually a
room-for-rent. But Permanent Supportive
Housing programs generally can’t backfill rooms for rent, they can only pay for
individual units. This costs additional
resources in terms of security deposits to move people from a room-for-rent
into an individual unit. Rapid ReHousing
programs are also able to serve fewer people when they’re taking very highly
vulnerable people.
ii. Jen’s
concerned that in some instances the resources are coming around at different
times, it’s really feeling like we are doing inconsistent referrals directly to
Permanent Supportive Housing depending upon vacancies.
1.
Some of this is an evolution because we do
need to continue matching people to permanent supportive housing because we
can’t leave vacancies open indefinitely.
2.
On the PSH side, we’re seeing folks refuse PSH
when it’s project based.
b.
One other big piece of discussion is around
identifying what tool to use to objectively assess the level of service need
for households once they are already housed by Rapid ReHousing. Two suggestions are the Acuity Index and the
full SPDAT assessment.
c.
Please send any feedback on this document that
you have to Matt and Mollie for submission to the Progressive Engagement
committee by Friday.
7. GH CAN
Shelter and Housing Data – Mollie Greenwood
a.
Housing Program Vacancies 2017-2018 – Matt Morgan
(see p. 3)
i. This data
is based on the openings that are reported to the housing matching meeting over
the course of the year The point here is
to show how totally volatile our process has been.
1.
Mollie – follow up with matt on how frequently
this document should be coming back.
2.
It would be helpful to have the numbers of
housing vacancies. Could we insert the
table with the raw data into here. Then
we could see the RRH and PSH numbers embedded within this chart.
b.
Trends (see attachment)
i. The past
three months we did not see a reduction in chronic homelessness. A lack of vacancies in housing programs has
been a factor.
c.
Statewide BNL Report (see attachment)
d.
GH CAN Housed Data, GH CAN Waitlist Data (see
p.2)
8. Future
Agenda Items?
1.
Homeless Outreach is a gap
2.
Double security Deposits as a potential gap
9. Announcements
a.
South Park Inn is actively searching for a
program director. The job description is
posted on South Park Inn’s website. That
person will eventually join this group.
GH CAN Housing Data
|
Data Element
|
Number
|
Notes
|
|
Chronically homeless households housed
in 2015
|
102
|
This includes clients housed through GH
CAN programs as well as through other subsidies or independent housing
|
|
Chronically homeless households housed
in 2016
|
211
|
This includes clients housed through GH
CAN programs as well as through other subsidies or independent housing
|
|
Chronically homeless households housed
in 2017
|
179
|
This includes clients housed through GH
CAN programs as well as through other subsidies or independent housing
|
|
Chronically homeless households housed
in 2018
|
68
|
This includes clients housed through GH
CAN programs as well as through other subsidies or independent housing
|
|
Total Chronically homeless households
housed in GH CAN
|
560
|
|
|
Verified Chronic Matched
|
31
|
|
|
Verified Chronic Not Yet Matched
|
5
|
We currently have 5 chronic verified
clients who have not yet been matched to housing.
|
|
Potentially Chronic Refusers
|
2
|
|
|
Verified Chronic Refusers
|
2
|
|
|
Potentially Chronic Matched
|
6
|
These households did not disclose a
disabling condition, and are matched to various programs.
|
|
Not Chronic Matched
|
7
|
|
|
Potentially Chronic Not Yet Matched
|
32
|
Right now we believe 32 households have
the chronic length of homeless history, but none of these individuals have
their homeless and disability
verifications completed.
|
|
Individuals - Active – Not Matched
|
611
|
This is Enrolled in CAN, Enrolled in TH,
and In an Institution
|
|
Families – Active – Not Matched
|
25
|
This is Enrolled in CAN
|
SmartSheet
Shelter Priority List Data
|
Individual Men
|
Individual Women
|
Families
|
|
83 Unsheltered/ In a Car
|
85 Unsheltered/In a Car
|
31 Unsheltered/In a Car
|
|
117 Total
|
125 Total
|
58 Total
|
