Open Path HMIS Warehouse

Introduction

The HMIS Warehouse project was initiated by the City of Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development to gather data from across various HMIS installations, produce aggregated reports, and supply de-duplicated client information to the Boston CAS system for Coordinated Access to housing.

The Warehouse is capable of ingesting standard HUD HMIS CSV files as well as data via the Social Solutions ETO API.

Copyright © 2017 Green River Data Analysis, LLC

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the license is available in LICENSE.md

Vision

The City of Boston made a conscientious choice to release this project into the open source under a GPL. Our goal is to promote this opportunity, allowing Boston's investment to assist other municipalities and organizations, and realize the vision of a tool under continuous, collaborative improvement helping communities nationwide.

Looking ahead, we see the Warehouse codebase serving as a foundation for all communities that report to the department of Housing and Urban Development, or have a need to aggregate and de-duplicate homeless client data from across various systems. To our knowledge, this is the only open source, freely available implementation of many HUD reports.

Application Design

The application is designed around the HUD Data Standards and the data structure is based on the HMIS Logical Model

The application is written primarily in Ruby on Rails and we use RVM to select a ruby version. Other ruby version managers should work fine, as would manually installing the ruby version mentioned in the .ruby-version

The application uses postgres for application data storage and Microsoft SQL Server or postgres for the warehouse data.

We've developed locally on OSX using homebrew and deployed to Ubuntu 16.04 using apt for dependencies.

Third-party Available Integrations

• Amazon Web Services provides cloud hosting services. Configured via various env variables. Services used outside of hosting are SNS, SES, S3, and Glacier. Terms: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

• ETO API and QaaWS - HMIS and ancillary data can be fetched via various endpoints. OpenPath accesses Social Solutions ETO in a variety of ways, custom configured for each installation. [https://www.socialsolutions.com/software/eto/]

• Nominatim - an API service for open street map data [https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org]. Only zip codes are sent to the service, used to display a map on client dashboards of last permanent destinations. Terms: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim/

• NOAA Weather - Weather for individual dates and one location per installation are fetched on-demand from NOAA [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2]

• Exceptions can be sent to a slack channel. Configuration is done via env EXCEPTION_WEBHOOK*

• MassHealth - X12 data transfer via api, configurable per installation

• OKTA - for single sign-on. [https://www.okta.com]

• US Census - for comparing HMIS and population data. [https://www.census.gov/data/developers/about/terms-of-service.html]

• Talent LMS - for training. [https://www.talentlms.com/terms]

Developer Prerequisites

If you are unfamiliar with contributing to open source projects on Github you may first want to read some of the guides at: https://guides.github.com/

There is a simple script to setup a development environment in bin/setup. To make it run smoothly you should have:

• A running Ruby 2.3+ environment with bundler 1.11+ installed.
• A local install of postgresql 9.5+ allowing your user to create new databases.
• A local install of redis for caching. redis-server should be running on the default port
• libmagic (brew install libmagic)
• freetds (brew install freetds)

Once these are in place, bin/setup should:

• Install all ruby dependencies.
• Create initial copies of configuration files.
• Create an initial database and seed it with reference data and a randomly generated admin user.

If all goes well you should then be able to run bin/rails server and open the Warehouse in your system at http://localhost:3000 using the email/password created during bin/setup. If not, read bin/setup to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

Hack on your version as you see fit and if you have questions or want to contribute open an issue on github.

Developer Notes

We use the following common rails gems and conventions:

• haml for view templating
• bootstrap for base styles and layout
• sass for custom-css
• simple_form for forms
• pagy for pagination
• brakeman for basic security scanning.
• rack-mini-profiler to make sure pages are fast. Ideally <200ms
• helpers need to be explictly loaded in controllers. i.e. we have config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = false set
• bin/rake generate controller ... doesn't make fixures and they are disabled in test_helper. We don't use them and instead seed data in test or let test create their own data however they need to.
• it also doesn't make helper or asset stubs, make them by hand if you need one. See config/application.rb for details.

Multiple databases

The project reads/writes from several different databases. We keep track of these different environments by setting up parallel db configs and structures for each database. Health care data is configured in config/database_health.yml and database resources are in db/health. Warehouse data is configured in config/database_warehouse.yml and resources are in db/warehouse. When running migrations, use the custom generators.

App migrations can be created with:

rails generate migration foo

and run with

rake db:migrate

Warehouse migrations can be created with:

rails generate warehouse_migration foo

and run with

rake warehouse:db:migrate

Health migrations can be created with

rails generate health_migration foo

and run with

rake health:db:migrate

HMIS CSV-Structured Tables

Several tables in the warehouse database are modeled after HMIS CSV Format Specifications (2024 link). These tables can be identified by their casing, which matches the CSV Spec. For example Enrollment, Client, ProjectCoC, etc.

The HMIS CSV-Structured tables share some common attributes:

• data_source_id: identifies which Data Source the HMIS data came from
• EnrollmentID: HUD Key referencing Enrollment table
• PersonalID: HUD Key referencing Client table
• ProjectID: HUD Key referencing Project table
• UserID: HUD Key referencing User table

These "HUD Keys" are used to link HMIS records together. We always use composite keys for relationships between HMIS CSV tables. This is necessary because HUD Keys are not unique across data sources.

FAQs

What's the difference between Enrollment.id and Enrollment.enrollment_id?

• Enrollment.id is that database ID for the enrollment. It is unique in the Enrollment table. It is an incrementing numeric id that is generated by the database.
• Enrollment.enrollment_id is the EnrollmentID column on the Enrollment table. We use aliasing the snake-case the HMIS fields, so you can either use EnrollmentID or enrollment_id (snake-case is preferred). This ID is a String (32 char max) that is defined by the HMIS system that generated the data. For the OP HMIS, we use uuids. Other HMIS's use other conventions. This value is NOT unique in the Enrollment Table, but it should be unique in combination with the data_source_id.
  • The above comments apply to ProjectID, PersonalID, OrganizationID, and HouseholdID.

What's the difference between GrdaWarehouse::Hud::Enrollment and Hmis::Hud::Enrollment models?

Both models are backed by the same table. We have separate model classes for the Warehouse and HMIS to encapsulate different logic. Shared logic is present in concerns (app/models/concerns/hud_concerns).

What's the difference between the User and users tables? Whats the UserID column all about?

What's the deal with the Custom<Something> tables?

There are some tables used by OP HMIS that look like CSV-structured tables, but they're not defined by the HUD spec. For example: CustomAssessments, CustomClientAddress, CustomClientName, etc. The CSV specs have a "Custom file transfer template" indicating that HMIS systems can export custom data in files Custom*.csv as long as they follow the basic HUD-style format (using EnrollmentID, DateUpdated, DateCreated, etc.). Because of that, we decided to implement some of the custom HMIS data tables using this pseudo-HMIS-CSV structure.

How to Create a New Report

Follow these steps to create a new custom report.

1. Generate scaffolding for a new Rails Driver:

   rails g driver custom_new_report_name

2. Add the relevant routes, controller, and view to the new Driver. See other examples for how they should be namespaced.
3. Add your new report to the report_list in the GrdaWarehouse::WarehouseReports::ReportDefinition model. Make sure to wrap it in a check to see whether the driver is loaded. See ReportDefinition for examples.
4. Finally, run rails db:seed to populate the database with your new report definition. Alternatively, you can run the two relevant steps individually:

   # Generates a new ReportDefinition
   GrdaWarehouse::WarehouseReports::ReportDefinition.maintain_report_definitions
   # Adds the report to the "all reports" group
   AccessGroup.maintain_system_groups