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What’s New in HIFIS

HIFIS 3.73 – What’s New since version 3.72?

Note

The majority of changes in this version have been in the Reports module. The next major version of the software, HIFIS 3.8, is currently in development and many software enhancement requests will be addressed in this version.

Reports

  • Creation of many new reports:
    • Geographic Region of Booked-In Clients
    • Attendance - Yearly with Gender
    • Conflicts Report
    • Returning Clients (including non-HIFIS stays)
    • First Time Clients
    • Admissions/Discharges
    • Stay Report
    • Income Change
    • Annual Income
    • Program Billing – Prorated
    • HPS Results Reporting
    • Booked-In Clients Currently Taking Medication
    • Clients Admitted on a Specified Date
  • Coordinator Reports:
    • HPS Report
    • Goods and Services
    • Turnaway
  • All reports including occupancy calculations have been modified to respect a beds availability status
  • Age Report: can now choose Stays or Goods and Services from the Activity drop down
  • Personal Needs Allowance: change in layout to include more information
  • Dormitory Register: now called Shelter Register
  • Age and Gender Report: age discrepancies in this report have been fixed; Referral, Health Issues and Aboriginal Indicator have been added to this report; and checkbox selector has been replaced with standard selector
  • Bed List reports: have been modified to exclude clients who were discharged on the selected reporting date
  • Age Bracket calculations have been reviewed to ensure consistency across reports.

Visibility

  • Visibility implementation has been improved across all HIFIS functions based on user feedback.
  • Can no longer access family management functions when visibility protocols are enabled.
  • Block Operations now respect visibility rules
  • All reports have been modified to support visibility filters

Clients

  • A client can now only be turned away once per day from each shelter
  • Photos are now captured to a path specified in HIFIS defaults
  • Can no longer provide a Good or Service to an inactive client
  • Can no longer enter overlapping historical stays
  • Can no longer make a reservation for a client during a period in which the client is barred

Other Changes

  • Can now sort by different columns in client programs
  • Bug fix: in age brackets, can now edit the upper most bracket as well

HIFIS 3.72 – What’s New since version 3.7?

Special Note

When booking in a family, it is important to select the family members you want to book in before doing anything else in the window. There is a known problem that allows for incorrect data if family members are selected or unselected after other information is entered. This problem will be fixed after 3.72.2150.

Housing Assistance

A new Housing Module is in the Beta stage. It allows you to record housing placements and follow-up interviews.

  • Can indicate housing type, location and rent amount
  • Give reasons why housing was not secured
  • If secured, can do follow-up interviews at regular intervals to record whether or not a client is still in the housing and if they have left, why

Reports

  • In the Service Provider selector, can now only choose service providers that are visible to the user
  • Numerous report layouts have been changed to facilitate viewing of information
  • All known data inaccuracies have been addressed and corrected. In particular, the following reports have been redesigned to correct any inaccuracies:
    • Length of Stay
    • Shelter
    • Attendance Monthly
  • More advanced sorting tools have been implemented
  • User can no longer run reports for Service Providers that they do not have access to

Stays

  • You can now assign a stay comment to an individual or the entire family
  • There is now a check before saving a bed assignment to ensure a bed has not been booked by another user after the book in window is opened when booking in a single client
  • Can no longer create a reservation for a client when he/she is barred
  • Can no longer assign the same program for the same client and the same stay
  • Can now add a Referral to a Reservation record
  • When booking-out, the Reason for Discharge value ‘ Returned to partner/family’ has been split into two values
  • The legend display in Family Book-in or –out has changed

Reception Window

  • The filter in the reception window has been expanded to show Booked-in clients, Booked-in With or Without Funding and Not Booked-in

Clients

  • Can now create a Turnaway record for a Barred client
  • The tabs in the Client Details window have been re-organized in preparation for the expansion of export fields
  • ‘Since’ field added to marital status in the family screen in order to show duration of the relationship
  • Can now indicate number of past non-HIFIS stays
  • There are several new contributing factors look up values
  • When assigning Goods and Services through the Front Desk, you can now ‘Jump to a Family Member’
  • All 3 dependent types are now functional in the Family Management window

Administration

  • New Client Visibility Rules: now possible to limit which clients a user can ‘see’ and edit based on gender and age
  • Shelter IDs now have two letters after the ID to allow for a greater number of secondary service providers.
    Note: in the Reports module, the Service Providers will have to be re-selected for all previously used reports
  • First Nations Communities have now been added to the list of cities
  • The Bed Availability function is now enabled. A bed can now be made unavailable if it is broken, if it is shared, etc. This can be done through the Front Desk/Book-in or in Administration.

Other Changes

  • From the Help Menu, there is now an option to download and test new HIFIS3 Beta versions of the software
  • Changes to the Launcher make it possible to set HIFIS up on other than the C:\ drive
  • There are now links from the HIFIS Help menu to download software related documents
  • Some formatting changes in the Questionnaires Windows to make them easier to read
  • ‘Current Occupation’ in the Client Details window and ‘Occupation Status’ in the lookups have both been changed to ‘Employment Status’

HIFIS 3.7 – What’s New since version 3.6?

The following is a summary of what’s new or improved in the HIFIS 3.7 software:

Reports

  • New: there are many new reports that have been created since the previous release. Below are a few highlights:
    • Program Billing: this is a better version of the Client Billing report
    • Turnaways Report
    • Shelter Occupancy
    • Household Composition Report
  • Improved: in addition to new reports, most existing reports have been modified and known bugs have been fixed.
    • Ability to run reports based on stays or Goods and Services activity
    • Calculations have been improved for more consistency across reports
    • Reports that run for All Clients now do so automatically, while in reports that require a client selection only one client can be selected
    • You can now choose to run reports by date, year or month in the Reporting Period

Stays

  • Historical Bookings: Any NON-CURRENT (Historical) stays should now be entered through the new Historical Booking. This avoids the current problem of multiple stays without an OUT date
  • HIFIS now prevents Book Ins that overlap previous stays
  • Ability To Undo a Book Out to extend a stay
  • Stays can now be merged in the STAYs screen if the Book Out date is the same as the subsequent Book In date
  • Programs now close automatically for family/graphical book-outs

Clients

  • New field in Client Vitals to record a client’s date of death and cause of death
  • Can no longer add multiple financial profiles for a single client
  • Can no longer deactivate or bar a client who is booked in
  • Cloning a client now copies all specified fields
  • Bug when searching for clients by ID number from the Select Client button fixed
  • Bug when entering a ‘Since’ date for a relationship fixed

Reception Window Enhancements

  • Client name is now highlighted YELLOW if booked in at a shelter not available to the user and cannot be booked out by this user. Also, a new shelter icon on the bottom left indicates which shelter a client is booked into
  • Visual markers now indicate if client is member of a family, a family head or disabled
  • Can now search by File Number in Reception

Administration

  • Automated Updates: Administrators can now select Check for HIFIS updates under the Help menu and the software will update automatically
  • Lookup values can now be activated/deactivated in batch. Centrally deactivated values can no longer be activated
  • HIFIS sites now manage their email type and SMTP from the Defaults screen and not by editing the .ini file(s)
  • On startup, HIFIS will now check if central lookups are modified and make the update if needed

Other Changes

  • Addresses are now geo-coded and can be looked up in map view if an internet connection is available
  • Can now set a program rate to $0
  • Bulletins now appear in the order they were created
  • Bulletins for a service provider that is not accessible to this user do not show up
  • All user-defined mandatory fields are now highlighted in red
  • Age brackets are now available for Coordinators
  • CSV files now named after the report and are placed in the Exchange folder
  • Bug when navigating through Programs fixed
  • Activation Keys Assistant now working in French

HIFIS 3.6 – What’s New since version 3.50.2025?

The following is a summary of what’s new in the HIFIS 3.6 software:

Reports

  • Various reports have been fixed and new ones added to HIFIS 3.6
    • Hot Meal Count
    • Client Billing - Programs Rate Change
    • Bedlist - Checklist and inactive beds
  • Data Tools for Shelters
  • Reports to Comma Separated Values (CSV) do not get overwritten

Conflict Module

  • Can now add Conflict Records between clients
    • Description of Conflict - Intensity, Probability, Relationship
    • Referral - From, To
    • Comments

Comments

  • Comments can now be edited or deleted by the author or an administrator

Geographical Location Software

  • Addresses are now geocoded and can be looked up in map view if an internet connection is available.

Reception Window Enhancement

  • Can now filter to only display Booked in Clients
  • Visual Indicator for Disabled Clients
  • Visual Indicator for Family heads
  • Visual Indicator for Family members

Other Enhancement

  • Ability to Edit Referrals
  • Ability to spell-check free text edit boxes
  • Red Border for High-Priority Bulletins
  • Can now add Cents for Cost in Goods & Services
  • Hours and minutes added for Services provided
  • Last Names Spelling - Blanks and Periods allowed, for example “St. Paul”
  • Photo Capture Utility in Client Details
  • New National Occupation Codes (NOC) values added in the Employer Table
  • New Check Box for Self-Reported in Client Health Record
  • Multiple Auto-Backups now made before Upgrading to a newer version
  • Complex Duplicate Finder is now optional
  • Improved the Readability of the HIFIS Defaults Window – now 4 Tabs
  • Can now delete Unused Programs
  • Can now search for Client’s name in Financial Profiles
  • FTP export Option for Coordinators
  • Shortcut to copy Activation Keys – new Wand button
  • Housing Tab – Country now defaults to Canada
  • Cannot add a Duplicate Shelter Name

HIFIS 3.5 – What’s New Since 3.4?

The following is a summary of what’s new in the HIFIS 3.5 software:

Service provider types now support non-shelters

  • A Shelter has Emergency and/or Transitional beds
  • A Non-Shelter is any other provider without such beds

Reports

  • Various reports have been fixed.
  • Various new reports have been added to HIFIS 3.5
  • New Coordinator reports
    • Age
    • Admission
    • Shelter
    • Returning
    • Age/gender Statistics
  • Reports can now be flagged as ‘Favourite’

Data Integrity

  • Search for Duplicate Clients
  • Birth Dates Analyzer
  • Bad Key Values Analyzer
  • Stay Dates Analyzer
  • Concurrent Stays Analyzer
  • VFP (Visual FoxPro) Command Window

Conflict Prototype

Note: Everything on the screen is subject to change

  • Conflict module is a new feature under development. We encourage you to provide feedback by November 14, 2007

Exports

  • Export to coordinator can be automatically emailed
    • Make sure you enter the coordinator email in Administration/Defaults
  • Coordinator exports can be automatically FTPed to National

Alternate Format

This document is also available for downloading or viewing:

What’s New in HIFIS
(PDF Version, 56 Kb)

To access the Portable Document Format (PDF) version you must have a PDF reader installed. If you do not already have such a reader, there are numerous PDF readers available for free download or for purchase on the Internet:

Date Modified: 2012-04-16
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