OHCS' Housing Stabilization team focuses on housing retention and homeless services programs. Our dashboards highlight how our work benefits communities throughout the state. Below, you'll find the data limitations portion of our guide for the 2025-2027 Biennium Data Dashboard.
Determination of Persons Served
A person is considered to be served if they have an enrollment with a program, an exit from a program, or moved into housing within the 25-27 biennium. To ensure we captured persons who may have been enrolled in a program prior to the 25-27 biennium but still received services during the biennium, we assumed that clients lacking exit dates are currently enrolled in a program. Therefore, we capture any individual who lacks an exit date and those with an exit date between July 1, 2025 – Dec. 31, 2025.
Data Limitations
County was chosen as the level of geographic granularity for this dashboard. The location is determined by the CoC region of the provider. Several CoCs serve multiple counties so when a client was located in one of those CoC regions, a client’s county was determined using the self-reported county of current residence.
Users will not be able to match the sum demographic or programmatic categories to calculate totals with the Total Served categories. This is due to the nature that clients can be served by multiple programs, clients may show in multiple counties due to migration, and/or certain data are added to counts manually since they are not found in HMIS, such as Victim Service Provider (VSP) data and Eviction Prevention Rapid Response Program (EPRR).
Populations not included
OHCS does not collect data on all homeless or at-risk populations. OHCS can collect data only from state- and federally-funded programs that participate in a CoC's HMIS. People experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness who are served by a locally-funded program run by a city, county, or other municipality are not captured in this dataset. In addition, the dataset used for the dashboard does not contain all data on the following groups: Victim Service Providers (VSP), Oregon’s recognized Tribal entities, and Culturally Responsive and Culturally Specific Organizations (CRO-CSO).
Victim Service Providers
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) contain strong, legally codified confidentiality provisions that limit victim service providers from sharing, disclosing or revealing victims’ personally identifying information, including entering information into shared databases like HMIS and must use a Comparable Database that collects client-level data over time and generates unduplicated aggregate reports based on that data. VSPs’ numbers are included on the dashboard, but only aggregated totals by program that are added manually. No other data, such as demographics, are present. Due to this manual addition to the HMIS dataset, totals in demographic visuals may not match those displayed in Total Household and Total Individuals served.
Culturally Responsive and Culturally Specific Agencies (CRO-CSO)
OHCS has set-aside funds to disburse toward organizations that provide services to specific cultural groups. Not all our CRO-CSO partners use HMIS, so our data is limited to what appears in our HMIS dataset. Thus, we lack total visibility in our dashboard on all CRO-CSO programmatic work.
Eviction Prevention Rapid Response (EPRR) Data
The EPRR program is administered by an external partner and does not input data into HMIS. Therefore, the data OHCS collects is limited to total count of participants. EPRR data is present in total counts and in the Executive Order goal for rehousing. There are no EPRR data present in any demographic information at this time.