Housing Services 101: The Complete Guide for HCBS Agencies
Navigating the complexities of Housing Services can be daunting for Home & Community-Based Services (HCBS) agencies. From consultation to stabilization and beyond, understanding the fundamentals is essential.
Whether you are already delivering Housing Services now or thinking about it for the future, check out how Pavillio can help your agency lay a foundation for success.
Understanding Housing Services
Housing Services encompasses a range of supports aimed at ensuring individuals with disabilities, including mental illness and substance abuse disorder, have access to safe, affordable, and stable housing. For HCBS agencies, integrating Housing Services into care plans is crucial for addressing the social determinants of health and promoting positive outcomes for individuals.
Key components and program services include:
- Housing Consultation: Housing consultation involves assessing individuals’ housing needs, preferences, and challenges. This may include identifying the right housing options, understanding eligibility criteria for housing assistance programs, and providing guidance on navigating the housing market.
- Housing Stabilization: Housing stabilization focuses on helping individuals maintain their housing stability once housed. This may involve help with rent payments, landlord mediation, budgeting skills, and connecting individuals with community resources for ongoing support.
- Housing Transition: Housing Transition are services that assist a person to plan for, find, and move to a home in the community. This could include developing a housing transition plan and supporting the person to apply for benefits to afford housing, for example.
- Housing Sustaining: Housing sustaining services support a person’s ability to maintain living in their own home or community. This could include developing, updating or modifying the housing support and crisis/safety plan on a regular basis, for example.
Additionally, for individuals and agencies interested in providing Housing Services programs, it is also important to ground in the following:
- Housing Assistance Programs: Familiarizing oneself with housing assistance programs is essential for HCBS agencies. These programs, such as Section 8 vouchers, supportive housing initiatives, and rapid re-housing programs, can provide crucial financial assistance and supportive services to individuals in need.
- Housing First Approach: Embracing a Housing First approach is increasingly recognized as an effective strategy for addressing homelessness among individuals with complex needs. This approach prioritizes providing individuals with immediate access to permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with wraparound supports to promote housing stability.
Helping HCBS agencies navigate Housing Services
HCBS agencies are increasingly adding Housing Services to their current offerings while new agencies dedicated to this program offering are consistently launching and attracting clients.
Why is this trend growing in popularity?
There are several reasons, namely the ease of market entry. Documentation requirements aren’t as robust as other programs and agencies, such as in Minnesota, typically don’t need a license specifically for it.
At the same time, there is a pool of ready clients eager for help. For example, a new Pavillio customer recently shared how she started her own HCBS agency specializing in Housing Services after meeting so many individuals needing help through her volunteer work. Her previous agency had such a long waitlist, it couldn’t meet demand. In order to provide care, she started her own operation and is now serving more than 15 clients after a few months of launching.
How Pavillio supports Housing Services
Pavillio is an an end-to-end platform for total agency management. This means agencies can do everything they need to do to manage their operation in one place – billing, capturing visits, tracking claims status and submissions, care documentation, and more.
In many cases, agencies – even with an automated operations and billing software platform – have their Service Agreements stored in one location and then manually track notes in another location. Then, they have to marry documentation to submit for claims. With Pavillio and with all of the Service Agreements, notes and claims management in one centralized spot. As a result, billing can take minutes and hours versus days.
Especially for smaller and startup agencies that don’t yet have a cash flow cushion, this ability to streamline claims and payments is critical to their financial health.
These are a few of the reasons Lisa Garcia chose Pavillio when starting her Housing Services agency – Garcia Services.
“Most of my days are spent taking care of clients, so I will do my administrative and operational work, like billing at night,” said Garcia. “Often, I will submit a Support request directly in Pavillio and then have an answer to my questions first thing in the morning.”
Garcia also appreciates and uses the direct faxing feature – something other platforms lack.
“I think I made every mistake you could make,” said Garcia. “I worked in inventory control and then customer service before recovery so I’m okay with making mistakes. I just need to know how to fix them.”
Have questions?
Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about how we can help.
Resources
Want to learn how Lisa Garcia started her own Housing Services agency? Check out the case study.
Lisa Garcia, CEO and Founder of Housing Services HCBS agency Garcia Services