What is AHAR?
The Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) is a regional report that is submitted to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on an annual basis. HUD subsequently gathers this information and prepares a report for Congress detailing the extent and nature of homelessness in America. In addition to nationwide estimates of homelessness the report also includes information on the demographic characteristics of homeless persons, service use patterns, and the capacity to house homeless persons. The report is based primarily on data collected within the various Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) for persons who have experienced homelessness during a 12-month period between October 1st of the prior year and September 30th of the current year.
AHAR is a Process – Not Just a Report
Creating an AHAR report that is an accurate reflection of reality is akin to baking a cake. The data sets are your ingredients, the reporting environment is your kitchen, the data analysts are your baker, and the finished report is the cake. Simtech Solutions provides both the kitchen and the baker and simply asks each region to help in gathering the ingredients. The quality controls we have in place help ensure that the data is ready to be used as the ingredients for the finished report.
Simtech Solutions produces AHAR for several regions that either use more than one HMIS (and therefor their ingredients need to be gathered in our kitchen/warehouse from each vendor before a report can be run) or their vendor is not capable of producing an accurate AHAR report. If you would like help in addressing your regional reporting needs please contact us so that we might discuss next steps.
The instructions linked to here are a step-by-step recipe for how to create and submit the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) for a region.