Which look-up tables should I customize?

There are, at the time of writing, 115 look-up tables in HIFIS that you can customize. For a new HIFIS community, this can be overwhelming!

I've seen some communities go through every single table and want to make careful decisions about each and every option in each table, which takes so much time! There are roughly 1,400 options in these tables, combined (roughly 10 per table). So if you spent only 30 seconds on each option deciding whether you want it or not, you're still spending 10 hours going through your drop-down menu options!!

So. What's a better way to spend your time? Are there certain tables you should focus your attention on?

Yes.

Yes there are.

Definitely Review

Here is a list of tables that I would strongly encourage all communities to review and make modifications if warranted. If you don't make changes to these tables, you are likely to get service providers complaining that HIFIS doesn't match how they do things. Changing these drop-down menus is an easy way to increase buy-in.

Tip: you can set different values per service provider. So you can keep some options turned on for your shelters, for example, while turning them off for your meal programs.

• Reason for Service. Nearly every service provider has different reasons for service. A shelter's reason for service could include things like "Hot / Cold Alert" that simply don't make sense for a rent bank. "Detoxification" is a default option, but that would only be a legitimate reason for service for a small number of service providers.

  • Note that Reason for Goods and Services is a different table for some reason, although they contain identical values. If you customize the first one and expect those changes to also apply to the Goods & Services module, you have to change this table too.

  • One more note: front line staff love to select the option "Housing - Lack Of." If 80% of your service recipients have the Reason for Service of "Housing - Lack Of" then it's not actually very useful data. Is there a way you can get more meaningful data out of this field?

• Services and Goods are the drop-down menus that control what options show up as the assistance you provided in the Goods & Services menu.

• Group Activities controls the types of Group Activities offered.

• Geo Region controls the geographic regions in your HIFIS instance. If you have a large catchment area, you will absolutely be using the Geographic Region Filter and this is going to be super relevant. If you're smaller, it's less relevant. However, the default options are things like "This Community" which you should probably replace with the actual name of your community.

• Reasons for Turn Away. Similar to Reason for Service, service providers all have different reasons why they would turn someone away. Some default options include things like "No Appointment Scheduled" or "Insufficient Food Supply."

• Reason Restricted is used in the Service Restrictions module and it has the opposite problem - not enough options. By default there are only 5, and the options probably don't match the reasons why Service Restrictions may be issued in your community.

Priority Level 2

The next category are tables that you probably do want to get around to modifying, but aren't as urgent or high priority as the ones listed above. Either the default options are pretty good, or the module won't be used as frequently. For whatever reason, you can get away with not updating them immediately, but one day, you probably should.

• Reason for Discharge. This is used on shelter book-outs, and the list is pretty good, but some tweaks would increase buy-in. Also, similar to Reason for Service, above, staff have a favourite option they select in this menu too: it's "Whereabouts Unknown."

• Report Categories allows you to put Reports into categories and control which users have access to which categories of reports. By default, there's only one option - General - and your front line staff aren't actually going to see this information. However, one day you're probably going to want to categorize your reports with more specificity than just having one category.

• Incident controls the Nature of Incident field on the Incidents module. Some communities have really involved conversations about what to do when they can see that an incident occurred at another service provider. The Nature of Incident field is shared, so this could be strategically used to communicate to other service providers.

• Reason Housing Not Secured. If you're using the Housing Placements module, you're likely using Attempts. By default, there are only 4 reasons why housing might not have been successful, so you probably want to expand that list.

• House as in "House Types." Not that I don’t actually recommend that you change the whole list - the list is pretty good on its own, although you could make some tweaks - but this look-up table is unique in that there is an extra field indicating whether it is “Placeable” - in other words, in the Housing Placement module, can people be placed into that type of housing. Housing First workers would likely point out that they’d never intentionally try to move someone into a Correctional Facility, for example…
  

Consider Customizing

The following are tables that you may want to customize under certain circumstances, but this is an even lower priority.

• Desired Outcome controls the Goal field in Case Management and Session Activity Types controls, well, the Session Activity. The reason this is lower priority is the options are generally pretty good, and there's a LONG list of session activity types, so it will take a while to go through. Also, session activity types are tied to a goal, so you have to think about what goal a session activity type should go with.

• Digital Contact is used in the Contact Information module. I’ve provided some tips to customize this for you to get maximum use out of this module.

• Contributing Factor, Behavioural Risk Factor, Watch Concern Types, or Life Events could be customized if you’re using those modules.

• Debt if you're using the Debts module, there's only one option in the drop-down.

• Income the list is pretty good, but there could be some optimizing going on. For example, in Ontario you might replace the “Provincial Social Assistance” option with “Ontario Works” to be more specific.

• Waiting Request Priority, Waiting Request Reason Types, and Waiting Request Status Types should all be modified if you’re using Waiting Lists.

Don’t Customize

There are close to 100 look-up tables that I didn’t mention. You probably should leave most of them alone. I’m going to put them in three categories:

• Okay to customize. While some of them are fine to customize if you see the need to (i.e. “Hair Colour”), chances are that it won’t be necessary to do so. This includes things like “Diet Category” which includes a list of things like Allergies or Diabetic or Vegan. You’re probably not going to have another type of Diet Category that isn’t already on the list.

• Unused tables. Some of the tables you can modify aren’t actually used in the software, which makes things confusing. For example, you might be scratching your head about where “Arriving By” or “Not Working Reason” or “Payment Methods” show up in HIFIS. The answer is: they don’t.

• System tables. In addition, there are actually some look-up tables in the Look-up Table List that really shouldn’t be customizeable at all. For example, the following tables can be changed: “Layout”, “Behaviour,” “Document,” “Group” but because they’re used by HIFIS to function, it’s probably a Bad Idea to change them at all.

As a general rule, if you can’t figure out what screen a look-up table appears on, don’t change it. If you want to change something that I haven’t explicitly talked about, check out the Report Writing and Data Mapping Guide, which helps identify which look-up tables appear on which screens.

See Also

• Blog post: Custom Look-up Table Values and Roll-Ups

• Report: Local Look-Up Table Configuration