Predicting Risk for Incidences of Homelessness Among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

As communities report significant decreases in Veteran homelessness from 2010 – 2015, mitigation efforts have turned from reactive care and rehabilitation to prevention. With significant populations of contemporary Veterans transitioning to civilian life from operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an opportunity to adapt transition and integration processes to preclude the risk of homelessness. This project attempts to curate priority intelligence requirements (PIR) aimed at identifying Veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn (OEF/OIF/OND) who are at risk of experiencing incidences of homelessness after ending service in the United States Army. Having developed effective PIR, this project attempts to deliver an immediate decision support tool for commanders, transition supervisors, and VA intake providers, as well as the framework to automate that information collection and risk analysis in the future. A decision support tool with five binary outputs (yes or no) was developed based on an existing corroborated model of risk factors for homelessness developed by the National Center for Homelessness Among Veterans. The tool easily represents individuals of higher risk of homelessness to a screener, with no added time or data collection burden. Further, a freeware script, compatible with all common data collection and storage systems, was developed to provide a baseline for further digital management efforts