Alaska Homeless Management Information System (AKHMIS)

In order to provide more effective services to people in Anchorage and Alaska who are struggling to get out of homelessness, service providers have joined together to implement AKHMIS.  Although AKHMIS was initiated to meet the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) data collection requirements, AKHMIS is working to make it an attractive tool for all homeless service providers.

Annual grants from HUD and the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) fund the AKHMIS. The Municipality of Anchorage, Department of Health and Human Services, Safety Links Program manages AKHMIS and provides oversight, training and technical assistance.

AKHMIS has adopted the use of Bowman System's ServicePoint (SP) as its platform for a coordinated community-wide HMIS. SP is a secure web-based application, which can be accessed through encrypted Internet connections from program offices. SP is the most widely used HMIS application in the country.

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In 2004, four (4) Anchorage community homeless service providers began using ServicePoint, entering 403 unduplicated clients. As of February 2010, there are 60 programs in 20 agencies, as well as two special projects (see next paragraph) that have entered data on over 23,000 unique unduplicated individuals.

The AKHMIS is also used to record Special Projects demographic data and produce reports for AHFC's Annual Point In Time Count and for the Project Homeless Connect events held twice a year in Anchorage.

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Effective implementation of AKHMIS will benefit homeless persons, homeless service providers, agency heads, public policy planners and the community as a whole. Among the anticipated benefits:

1. For homeless men, women and children, AKHMIS will make it easier to learn about and access the different types of shelter, services, and mainstream resources / benefits that are available and that they are eligible to receive.

2. For homeless service providers and agency heads, AKHMIS will make it easier to get information about services for their clients and will help streamline data collection and reporting.

3. For funders and public policy planners, AKHMIS will provide the big picture with data about homelessness in Anchorage. The data can be used to assess how long people are homeless, what their needs are, what the causes of homelessness are, how people interact with mainstream systems of care, the effectiveness of interventions, and an unduplicated count of homeless people.

4. For the community as a whole, over time, AKHMIS will provide increasingly useful information on what works best for supporting homeless persons in their work to regain and maintain stability. This kind of understanding ultimately leading to reductions in homelessness.

For more information about AKHMIS, please contact AKHMIS Project Coordinator, Sandra Olibrice @ (907) 343-6592 or via e-mail olibricesm@muni.org

HMIS Reports

AKHMIS Agreements & Policies

Consumer Privacy & Confidentiality

Assessment & Intake Forms

ServicePoint Maximizing System Performance & Speed