Trust the process, not the designer
Coordinated entry has been burned before by tools that claimed objectivity, produced opaque numbers, and were later shown to predict poorly. You should not have to trust whoever built HEAT. You should be able to inspect how decisions are made, how mistakes are corrected, and how the instrument changes over time. That is the standard used in medicine, aviation, and safety-critical engineering, and it is the standard this page holds HEAT to.
Two statements we will defend
On how HEAT is built: HEAT was developed using modern software engineering tools, but every determination is produced by deterministic rules that print themselves, rule by rule, on the result they produce, and can be independently reproduced. No AI, model, or hidden weight participates in any determination. Identical answers always produce identical results.
On bias: We do not claim HEAT is unbiased; no instrument can honestly claim that. We designed it to minimize avoidable bias, we publish every rule, we test for unintended disparities during pilots, and we change the instrument when evidence shows a better approach. A facially neutral fact like emergency-room visits can become a proxy where care access differs by community; that risk is named in our Evidence Register and tested in our validation plan, not hidden.
The standing controls
- Everything versioned, nothing edited in place. Questions, rules, and thresholds change only by new version; every result records the versions that produced it, so any determination can be reconstructed later.
- Every determination explains itself. The full reasoning trace, rule by rule, is on every result. There is nothing to reverse-engineer because nothing is hidden.
- Automated release gates. An automated suite runs on every change: golden scenarios, a practitioner-reviewable chronicity corpus, simulated clients, impossible users, thousands of randomized rule-interaction checks, and a suite proving the factors HUD forbids using to screen people out can never change any determination.
- A public change log that includes our mistakes, with root causes, and an Evidence Register stating why each question exists, what was rejected, and what could go wrong.
- Structured disagreement. Professionals can file "I would have decided differently" from any result; participants can change any answer at any time and appeal through their CoC's documented process. Both land in a review queue.
- A standing public challenge. Find a scenario where HEAT reaches the wrong determination; accepted cases join the permanent regression suite before any fix is written, credited by the name you choose to leave.
- Planned for pilots: monthly non-punitive expert re-derivation of sampled assessments (the medical M&M model), outcome validation against a published baseline, and disparity monitoring with the pilot community's own data.
Review board: open seats
HEAT's rules should carry signatures from people who disagree with each other. We are recruiting a standing review board; the goal is not consensus but the sentence "I do not agree with every design decision, but this is a serious, evidence-informed instrument." Reviews rotate; every signed review lands in the Evidence Register with the reviewer's name and date.
- Open: homeless-medicine physician · emergency physician · psychiatrist or psychologist familiar with suicide risk · psychometrician or survey methodologist · CoC director · HMIS lead · domestic violence advocate · person with lived experience of homelessness (compensated) · fair housing attorney · current or former HUD TA reviewer.