Hamilton County Permanent Supportive Housing Initiative for High Utilizers

The purpose of this program is to assist local, state, and tribal governments in converting reentry and permanent supportive housing (PSH) service contracts into outcomes-based contracts in order to ensure accountability and improve performance with regard to recidivism reduction (categories 1 and 2) and increasing nights housed and emergency service savings (Category 2).

The Second Chance Act Pay For Success Initiative: Outcomes-based Contracting To Lower Recidivism And Homelessness will provide assistance and funding to state, local, and tribal governments to price, write, negotiate, fund, and manage contracts that pay for these services in a way that ensures accountability of the contract service providers, and incentivizes improved performance over time. Contracted services that may be purchased with grant funds include reentry services which are tailored to individuals leaving incarceration who are at moderate to high risk for recidivism in the community and services available to individuals living in permanent supportive housing units.

The overall goal of the FY 2019 Second Chance Act Pay For Success Initiative: Outcomes-based Contracting To Lower Recidivism And Homelessness (SCA OBC) is to improve the capacity and effectiveness of governments to pay for outcomes rather than inputs and outputs. The goal of these outcomes-based contracts is to improve recidivism, housing, and functional outcomes (increases in number of nights housed in a permanent supportive housing unit and reduction in number of nights spent in emergency facilities) for service recipients while improving public safety and saving taxpayer dollars.

The specific objectives of category 2 are as follows: enter into an outcomes-based contract to provide permanent supportive housing services for a specific subset of the community’s population who exceed identified thresholds for hospital and homeless system service use and jail bookings; manage the outcomes-based permanent supportive housing services contract including data and report collection, and regular metric and outcome reviews between governments and service providers; on and off-site monitoring; outcomes validation; incentive payment approvals; and ensuring government staff and service providers have adequate training on SCA OBC procurement, permanent supportive housing service/intervention, data collection, and outcomes validation.

The Hamilton County will use award funding to implement an outcomes-based contract (OBC) to double the scale of a pilot for Permanent Supportive Housing and Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) services, ultimately serving 100 individuals with severe mental illness who are frequent utilizers of the local homeless, hospital, and jail systems. The pilot utilizes the FUSE (Frequent User Systems Engagement) approach, an outcomes-based methodology developed by the Corporation for Supportive Housing. The County will procure an experienced Pay For Success intermediary to manage the OBC, and an independent evaluator to measure performance and validate outcomes.

CA/NCF