Homeless Management Information System (HMIS)

In 2001, Congress asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to require communities to develop an unduplicated count of the homeless. Congress required this for two reasons. Cities with good data systems are able to do a better job of addressing the problem of homelessness. And a reliable and comprehensive homeless data set was required and needed to effectively allocate federal money.

HUD needed communities to collect accurate data on homelessness in order to evaluate the effectiveness of local homeless programs. With this accurate data, Congress could appropriately assess progress toward the initiative to solve the chronic homeless problem by 2013.

To meet this goal, HUD required federally funded public and nonprofit organizations to implement a homeless tracking system. Out of this directive came the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) , a computerized data collection application and storage system. HMIS facilitates the collection of information on homeless individuals and families using residential or other homeless assistance service agencies. It also has the capacity to integrate data from all homeless service providers across the state. This state data can then be aggregated nationally in order to establish effective Federal policies to address homelessness.