WellSky to release special COVID-19 fields to WellSky Community Services
WellSky understands the importance of tracking meaningful information about the impact the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has on the populations served by our clients. Many communities have asked us for guidance, and other communities have already begun tracking COVID-19 data. As a result, the WellSky Human and Social Services team convened a work group of interested clients to discuss adding a small, standardized set of fields to help our clients track COVID-19 consistently.
By providing standardized fields in our solutions and recommended, solution-specific implementation guidance, we hope to reduce the burden on our system administrators, minimize the variation of COVID-19-related fields in each data system, and create meaningful standard reports to help our clients communicate what they are seeing among the populations they serve.
On March 19, 2020, WellSky hosted a conference call with client representatives from multiple WellSky Human and Social Services solutions to review current activities, planned activities, and the potential to coordinate efforts across the country. The group determined that a formal data set would be ideal to implement within each care setting using WellSky Human and Social Services solutions.
On March 20, 2020, WellSky convened smaller work groups to finalize the data sets to be released within each solution. We also discussed and documented best practice workflows. WellSky is committed to providing these fields and the accompanying guidance for how best to operationalize them within WellSky Community Services as quickly as possible this week.
On March 21, 2020, HUD published
this document created by its Technical Assistance partners that provides clear guidance on what rules allow for sharing HMIS data with new or non-traditional CoC organizations. The guidance also highlights the work of Louisiana's Balance of State Continuum of Care, a WellSky client, to create a set of COVID-19 data elements. This work was instrumental for the work group and is the basis for the final set of COVID-19 data elements that WellSky will include in WellSky Community Services.
Please stay tuned for an announcement later this week regarding the availability of this new set of data elements, guidance on best practices for implementing them within existing workflows, and an opportunity to take part in a reporting-focused work group to design standard dashboard reporting that can be used to tell your own local story.
We encourage each community to wait for the standard fields to be made available in WellSky Community Services later this week to take full advantage of the resources created for you.
