Silicon Valley Triage Tool

The number of homeless people needing housing far exceeds the available housing supply, and there is not a fair, objective system for prioritizing who gets to be housed. The triage tool addresses this problem by identifying individuals for whom the solution of housing costs less than the problem of homelessness. What makes the tool valuable is being able to distinguish accurately between different types of homelessness and predict outcomes. Homelessness is not ‘one size fits all.' A few individuals are likely to remain homeless and use public services extensively, while most others have short stints and use fewer services.The tool uses 38 pieces of information to calculate the probability that a homeless individuals will have ongoing high costs. The information includes age, gender, time spent in jail, medical diagnoses, and use of hospital facilities. The tool produces a probability from 0.01 to 0.99 that an individual will have continuing high public costs.The tool can be used to screen people individually or to screen a large database of people experiencing homelessness. When a large group of people are screened, they can be ranked by their probability of being high-cost users of public services. This is a very effective way of matching people with the highest costs with the available supply of housing.As with all predictive modeling algorithms, there are trade-offs between maximizing the number of high-cost homeless persons correctly identified and minimizing the number of low-cost homeless persons incorrectly identified. The model is particularly strong when using high probability cut-off levels. For the top 1,000 high-cost users predicted by the model, two-thirds of them are correctly identified as having high future costs. If this entire group of homeless individuals with high probabilities of ongoing high future costs were housed, the estimated annual savings would be $32,000 per person after paying for housing and supportive services