Evaluation of the Housing First Initiative of Chicago Housing for Health Partnership

The Chicago Housing for Health Partnership (CHHP) was developed to meet the challenge of providing housing to the most disadvantaged homeless people in the city: those with chronic illnesses who are being discharged from a hospital. The program model was community based and collaboratively created and monitored by an oversight committee composed of the leadership of all involved partner agencies. The CHHP was a group of 8 nonprofit agencies that provided supportive housing and 2 agencies that provided interim housing or respite care. Supportive housing was defined by the intervention as housing without time limits combined with services to help participants to live more stable, productive lives.

To evaluate this new service model, a prospective randomized trial was designed to examine the effect of supportive housing and intensive case management on health service utilization. The investigators enrolled homeless patients with at least 1 of 15 chronic illnesses from 2 urban hospitals that were members of the partnership and known to have large numbers of unstably housed patients. The chronic illnesses were associated with increased mortality in the homeless21 and were verified through review of physician hospital notes. This trial is the health outcomes portion of CHHP.