Coordinated entry assessment, explained

Coordinated entry is the process a Continuum uses to get people from wherever they turn up to whatever housing exists, in an order the community has agreed on rather than an order set by who knew which number to call. HUD requires every CoC to run one across its whole geographic area.

It has four parts: access, the doors people come in through; assessment, working out what someone needs; prioritization, ranking who gets the next unit; and referral, actually sending them there. This page is about the second one, which is the part frontline staff spend their time inside and the part that has been under the most scrutiny.

What HUD requires of the assessment

The assessment has to identify a household's current housing situation, their housing and service needs, their risk of harm, and their risk of continued homelessness. It can happen in phases rather than all at once, and it should gather only what is needed to establish severity of need and eligibility. Not everything you might like to know. What is needed.

Standardization is the load-bearing requirement. Every access point in the CoC has to offer the same assessment approach, so that the answer someone gets does not depend on which door they walked through. HUD allows the approach to vary for five populations and no others: adults without children, adults with children, unaccompanied youth, households fleeing domestic violence or trafficking, and people at risk of homelessness.

What an assessment may never do

This section is worth knowing by heart, because it is the part a frontline worker can actually enforce in the room. These are prohibitions, not preferences.

Screen someone out for having no incomeToo little income, or none at all, cannot be a reason to turn someone away from the process.

Screen someone out for substance useActive use or a history of it. Neither is a permissible screen.

Screen someone out for a domestic violence historyOr for resistance to receiving services, or for the type or extent of disability-related services somebody needs.

Require disclosure of a specific diagnosisAn assessment cannot make someone name their disability or their diagnosis in order to be prioritized. This one gets broken often, usually by a well-meaning form rather than a person.

Refuse to assess someone who will not answer everythingUnless the information is genuinely necessary to establish or document eligibility, a person declining to answer does not end the assessment.

Deny services for refusing to share dataExcept where federal statute requires the sharing. Consent is not a toll gate.

Alongside these, the process has to comply with the Fair Housing Act, Section 504, Title VI and the ADA, and cannot discriminate on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, familial status, disability, or actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status. It also has to provide auxiliary aids where needed and be reachable by people with limited English.

HUD does not require a particular tool

Read the requirement again: a standardized assessment approach used at every access point. HUD says the assessment has to be consistent. It does not say what it has to be.

That distinction matters more than it looks, because most communities standardized on the same instrument, and that instrument has a history worth knowing.

The fact most people do not know

OrgCode, who created the VI-SPDAT, stopped supporting it in December 2020. In their own words, they would "no longer be investing time or resources in updating and supporting the VI-SPDAT." Version 3 was supported until 2022. Versions 1 and 2 were unsupported from the announcement.

They gave three reasons. Communities were using it in ways they had not intended and could not control. The debates around it had become a distraction from the work. And the tool was never designed with racial or gender equity in mind, which they named as a real gap.

They also said they had no plans to build a replacement, and were handing that responsibility to people with expertise in equity.

That was nearly six years ago, and a great many CoCs are still running it. Not out of negligence, usually. Replacing the instrument at the centre of a coordinated entry system means retraining every access point, rebuilding the prioritization logic, and losing comparability with your own history. It is a large piece of work and the alternative has to be ready.

What the research found

The National Alliance to End Homelessness reviewed the evidence in 2022. On whether scores predict what they are meant to predict, results were mixed: a study of youth found the score did predict returns to homelessness, while research on individual adults found it did not. At least three studies identified unintended racial disparities in outcomes. Interviewer variability affected answers, and some questions appeared to serve no purpose.

OrgCode's own guidance, before they stepped away, was that the tool should never be the sole basis for a resource decision. It was meant to be one input into a broader process. In a lot of communities it became the whole process, which is closer to the failure the creators described than a flaw in the questions themselves.

What you can do about it, and what you cannot

If you are a provider rather than the CoC, you do not choose the tool and you should not go rogue with a different one. Standardization is the requirement, and one agency assessing differently is the thing HUD is explicitly trying to prevent. Consistency has value even when the instrument is imperfect.

What is genuinely in your hands:

Enforce the prohibitions in the roomNobody gets screened out on income, substance use, DV history or service resistance, and nobody has to name a diagnosis to be prioritized. Your staff can hold that line at your own access point today, without asking anyone.

Reduce interviewer variabilityOne of the clearest findings in the research is that who asks changes the answer. Agreeing internally on how each question is phrased, and how you handle someone who does not want to answer, closes a gap that is entirely yours to close.

Look at your own referrals by raceYou do not need a research team. Compare who you assess with who gets referred and who gets housed. If those three populations look different from each other, that is worth raising, and you will be raising it with data rather than an impression.

Raise it at the CoC, with the source"The tool’s authors discontinued it and said it was not built for equity" is a very different conversation from "I do not like this tool." One is a fact about the instrument. The other is an opinion about a colleague’s decision.

Prioritization is a separate decision

The assessment produces information. Prioritization is what the CoC does with it, and HUD requires all people in need to be ranked in order of priority. The factors it names include functional impairments, use of crisis services, unsheltered status, vulnerability to illness or death, risk of continued homelessness, and vulnerability to victimization.

A single score is one way to combine those. It is not the only way, and communities building replacements have generally moved toward approaches that weigh several factors explicitly rather than collapsing them into one number.

The CE APR is not your report

Worth saying plainly because it confuses people every year: the Coordinated Entry Annual Performance Report is a system-wide report covering the entire CoC, regardless of how your CE system is organized. It is not a project-level submission and you do not file one for your agency.

If a victim service provider conducts CE assessments in your community, an additional CE APR CSV comes from their comparable database, since they cannot export from HMIS.

About COMPASS

We make case management software for organizations doing this work. It holds a prioritization list derived from each client's latest assessment, an event log with referral outcomes, and your own question set rather than one we chose for you.

Coordinated entry is one of three things we never put behind a plan tier, along with the cash forecast and Paths. An organization should not lose access to the process that houses people because of what it can afford this month.

That is the only pitch in this guide. The rest is true whatever system you run.

Has your CoC moved off the VI-SPDAT?

We would like to know what you moved to and how it went. Genuinely useful to the next community asking, and we will add what we learn to this page.

hello@illumipath.io

Sources

Local coordinated entry practice varies considerably and your CoC's own written standards govern how assessment works where you are. This page covers the federal floor. If something here does not match your community, your CoC is the authority and we would still like to hear about it.