Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) grantees need to track measurable outcomes to determine whether their services are having a positive impact on clients and to provide an empirical basis for improving quality of care. They also need a means of ensuring accountability to funders. This report addresses difficulties and potential benefits that HCH projects can expect as they engage in systematic program evaluation and use that information to improve quality of care and demonstrate the value of their work. The information and recommendations contained in this report were provided by members of the HCH Outcomes Work Group, convened in 2004–2005 by the National Health Care for the Homeless Council to assess the feasibility of measuring HCH service outcomes in a more comprehensive fashion than has been accomplished to date. Members of the Work Group and other consultants represented 17 HCH grantees in different regions of the United States. The Work Group was especially interested in exploring the development of a continuum of outcome measures that could be effectively used by HCH grantees with diverse structural models and clinical settings to quantify the impact of their services, despite limited resources.
