JeffL-T
commented
7 years ago Annual point-in-time (PIT) homeless counts contribute to our understanding of the extent, nature and trends of homelessness, which counted 40,000 homeless veterans in Jan 2016, of which 13,000 were unsheltered. [https://www.va.gov/HOMELESS/pit_count.asp]. Currently data is collected on paper forms and enter the data manually. The process might be improved by a tool to automate or assist the annual national count, and include readily available veteran-specific housing and social service solutions. An optical character reader can convert text into digital data saving hours of manual data entry.
Automating the point-in-time count process (develop a prototype that could be used for homeless Veterans count next year...scaleable to cover entire county populations in following years). Include not only the items required for the PIT; but have readily available housing and social service solutions for the surveyed Veterans.
"In the past, HUD provided access to a free mobile PIT application (app). This mobile PIT app is no longer available. However, HUD anticipates publishing the open source code to the app for communities that wish to use that in their discussions to determine whether to adopt mobile technology as part of their PIT counts. HUD also plans on publishing a summary of lessons learned from the PIT mobile app for communities to use. HUD has kept the webinar with the PIT survey tools and the mobile app overview available for communities to review."
The following resources are available at https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/3322/point-in-time-survey-tools/
Model Sheltered Night of Count PIT Survey (PDF) Model Observation-based Unsheltered Night of Count PIT Survey (PDF) Model Interview-based Unsheltered Night of the Count PIT Survey (PDF) Model Service-based PIT Survey (PDF) HUD Point-in-Time Survey Tools and Mobile App Overview Webinar (HTML) PIT Count Youth Survey - Comprehensive (PDF) PIT Count Youth Survey - Addendum (PDF)"