What changed, and why

2026-07-27 · v0.21.0 · instrument 0.8.0-pilot

Change: The instrument's first strengths-based question, by replacement rather than addition: "Was there ever a time when you had housing that worked well for you for six months or longer?" and, if yes, "What helped the most?" It replaced the employment question, whose signal the income question already carried everywhere it was used. The answer feeds support planning only: it appears on the card as a named strength, adds a build-on-what-worked offer, and never touches prioritization. Results also gained an optional free-text box: "Anything you want the housing help office to know?" — printed on the page in the person's own words, never scored, never analyzed, never saved or sent.

Why: External review: nearly every assessment question asks what is wrong; one should ask what already works, because what happens after prioritization is where people succeed or fail. Deferred from the same review, deliberately: a barrier self-attribution question (overlaps existing items; sensitive self-labeling), prior-community-housing (the HMIS-assisted phase will confirm it instead of asking), and a four-point rewording of the support question (held for clinical review rather than churning a scored item).

Mistake, again: For a few minutes this page's history wrongly showed old entries with the new instrument version, from the same careless version-update we logged on this page at v0.13.0. Restored, and the update script is now forbidden from touching this file's history. Repeating a logged mistake is worse than making it.

2026-07-27 · v0.20.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Answering yes to "are you in danger right now" or the urgent-medical question now stops the assessment immediately with a full-screen red page: "Stop. Get help first." — a Call 911 button, 988, and two honest choices: "I am safe enough at this moment — continue" or "Leave quickly (erases everything)." Nothing entered is lost while the page waits. If the person continues, a red reminder strip stays on every remaining screen.

Why: A tool should not calmly ask question two of twenty-five after someone says they are in danger. But it must interrupt, not eject: a survivor sitting safely in an advocate's office is describing her life, not this minute, and for her the assessment is the way out. Forcing people out of the housing line for saying yes would teach the most endangered people to say no. Interrupt, offer help, respect their answer.

2026-07-27 · v0.19.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Three fixes for the people actually holding the page. The client view now speaks plain words: "housing help office" instead of our field's "access point" (explained once, in parentheses), warm concrete steps, and a reminder that answers can always be changed and nothing is held against anyone. The case-manager view gained a "Do next" order sheet at the top: every output distilled into a short checkable action list (tonight's shelter check, what to raise first, the first documentation item, offers to make, the reassess-by date), modeled on medical order sheets; the drawers below keep the depth. And the openness claim now says exactly what is true: everything that matters is public on this site; the software itself is proprietary.

Why: A client should never need our vocabulary to get help, and a busy case manager needs orders, not a chart to excavate.

2026-07-27 · v0.18.1 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: A full audit of every claim this site makes, with each claim either backed by working machinery or reworded to what is true. Backed: continuous-integration tests now genuinely run on every change; the feedback form gained an optional name field so "credited" is real; printed records genuinely expand every section. Reworded: "the complete logic is published" became what is actually public today (every result's full reasoning, every question with its evidence; the open repository awaits a license decision); "211" is now "211 in most areas"; the victim-services route acknowledges some communities have no such provider; treatment information, not treatment, is what is ready on demand; "about ten minutes" became the verifiable "about 25 questions"; Category 1 is what programs require, not a door that opens.

Why: A tool that asks to be trusted on determinations cannot round up on anything else. No claim without machinery or evidence behind it.

2026-07-27 · v0.18.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: The case-manager record was a wall of nine stacked cards repeating what the Assessment Card already said. Now the card is the document, and everything else is a scannable drawer: one row per topic with its icon and verdict chip visible, open on demand (options to discuss starts open; everything prints expanded). Background pills now carry icons and color: population pathways in cyan, actionable barriers and exposure in amber. The brand mark gained a chimney, because a home should look warm.

Why: Nobody reads a wall. A record you can scan in five seconds and drill into in one click is what busy access-point staff actually need.

2026-07-27 · v0.17.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: The safety screen is now exception-only in every view. If a 911-type emergency is reported, a red "Get help now" banner leads the page and the card, with 911 and 988 in it. If not, the page says nothing about it: no "no immediate emergency identified" text, no neutral chip, nothing. The card leads with the person's actual housing status. The only non-emergency case that still surfaces is when the safety questions went unanswered, so a case manager knows to revisit them.

Why: Telling a person in a housing emergency "no immediate emergency identified" is a contradiction. Silence about the absence of one emergency, loud clarity about the presence of another. The determination itself is unchanged and remains in the record and reasoning trace.

2026-07-27 · v0.16.1 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Mistake: The assessment card's most prominent element was a green checkmark reading "No immediate emergency identified" — on a person sleeping outside in month 13. The safety screen only checks for 911-type emergencies, so nearly everyone got a green all-clear as their headline. The determination was correct; the presentation was misleading, and it contradicted the intensive support level printed right below it.

Fix: The card's status band now composes the safety screen with tonight's housing reality: unsheltered or in shelter shows a red "Housing crisis active" band; a facility stay, imminent housing loss, or doubled-up shows an amber caution band; green is reserved for people not in a housing crisis. The safety-screen result is stated underneath as "No 911-type emergency reported." No determination changed; only what the headline honestly says.

2026-07-27 · v0.16.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Results now have two views with a toggle: "For the client" (written to the person: their situation, their next steps, ready to print and hand over) and "For the case manager" (the professional record: determinations, documentation checklist, reasoning, reassessment). The starting view follows who is filling it out; either can switch any time. Section icons throughout the results.

Why: One page cannot speak to two readers at once. A case manager reading "you told us you are staying outside" on their own screen is jarring; a client handed a page of rule IDs is worse. Same facts, two documents.

2026-07-27 · v0.15.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Visual and honesty pass. New logo and favicon, section icons, back-to-top button. More important: a reality-check of every operational statement. The results page no longer implies a shelter bed exists tonight; it now says to ask an access point or 211, that HUD policy bars rationing beds by severity where they exist, and that beds are never guaranteed. "Crisis response is immediate" became "crisis services are never held behind a coordinated entry waitlist; what actually exists tonight depends on your community." The options list now states plainly that HEAT cannot see local openings.

Why: This tool is used where the rubber meets the road. A suggestion is honest; a promise about tonight's capacity is not ours to make.

2026-07-27 · v0.14.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Two new public pages. The Evidence Register: for every question, the evidence behind it, why it stays, alternatives rejected, known risks (including where a neutral-looking fact could act as a proxy), and honest review status. The Governance page: how decisions are made, checked, corrected, and challenged, plus open review-board seats. The register is generated from the instrument itself and the build fails if any question lacks an entry.

Why: External review advice we agree with: the long-term goal is a process that convinces people even if they do not trust the designer. The governance is the product.

2026-07-27 · v0.13.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Two questions reworded as new versions after external review: the cold-injury question now says "because you could not get warm" (a mountaineering frostbite from years ago is not homelessness risk), and the overdose question adds "or did someone have to revive you" (naloxone from a friend often is not counted as emergency help). New facility question: expected discharge within days now triggers plan-before-discharge urgency. Rule thresholds (4 crisis contacts, 12 months, 6 months) moved into editable instrument data with published rationale, and every rule now carries an evidence tier (direct, indirect, expert synthesis). Results say "Determination quality: Complete / Limited by missing information" instead of a bare completeness label.

Why: An external reviewer challenged the "ever" scope, recall framing, threshold justification, and rule-interaction validation. They were right on all four. We also added property tests proving no combination of answers can behave pathologically: risk answers can only raise, declines never count as anything, supersets never rank lower.

Evidence: Round-3 external review; docs/SUPPORT_NEED_RULES.md carries the full per-rule rationale.

Also fixed on this very page: a version-string update accidentally rewrote the version labels of two historical entries below before deployment. Restored from the record. A changelog that edits its own history is worse than no changelog.

2026-07-24 · v0.12.0 · instrument 0.6.0-pilot

Change: Soft-support offers added from government clinical guidance: naloxone kit after an overdose disclosure, unconditional treatment-access information, a concrete follow-up plus trusted-person reconnection after a suicide-attempt disclosure, medical respite after a health event or facility exit. Discharge guidance now directs contact with the facility's discharge planner.

Why: SAMHSA, NIMH, CMS, and HRSA guidance all pair risk identification with a concrete protective offer. A hotline reference alone is not enough.

Evidence: SAMHSA Overdose Prevention Toolkit; SAMHSA SAFE-T; SBIRT; NIMH ASQ; CMS discharge planning conditions; HRSA-funded medical respite standards.

2026-07-24 · v0.11.0 · instrument 0.6.0-pilot

Change: The support-planning construct was rebuilt around mortality evidence. Three health event-history questions were added (cold injury, overdose, suicide attempt), each skippable, each shown on screen only and never printed. Income and employment were removed from the vulnerability determination entirely.

Why: HEAT's purpose is identifying who is most likely to die if left in homelessness. Event-history binaries are the strongest known markers; income is a program-fit fact, not vulnerability, and carries disclosure bias.

Evidence: Hwang 1998 (JAMA); Roncarati 2018 (JAMA Internal Medicine); the LA CES triage-tool research report; HUD CE Equity Initiative guidance.

2026-07-24 · v0.10.0 · instrument 0.5.0-pilot

Change: The safety screen was reworded to describe a situation ("someone is hurting you, scaring you, or making you do things you do not want to do") instead of naming violence categories, and a consent question now lets survivors choose who helps them.

Why: HUD trauma-informed guidance: behavior-based questions identify people who do not label their experience as violence, including trafficking. Routing must be the survivor's choice.

Evidence: HUD Trauma-Informed Care guidance; CE and Victim Service Providers FAQs; VAWA 2022 requirements.

2026-07-23 · v0.9.2 · defect, honestly logged

Mistake: We shipped a rendering defect where every answer option could look already-selected on some system-theme combinations. Nobody's answers were affected (nothing was pre-selected in the data), but it looked broken and it was our fault.

Root cause: The page's color-scheme did not follow the chosen theme, so native form controls rendered in the wrong palette.

Fix: Radios are now custom-drawn and identical everywhere; visual QA now covers both themes on both OS appearances before any release.

2026-07-23 · instrument 0.2.0-pilot · wording defect caught pre-pilot

Mistake: Early history questions asked about time "without your own housing," which would have counted doubled-up time toward chronic homelessness and inflated determinations.

Fix: History questions now ask specifically about streets, shelters, and safe havens, matching the federal definition. Caught during the primary-source verification pass, before any real use.

Evidence: 24 CFR 578.3; Federal Register preamble (80 FR 75791).