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Organization: Homeless Coalition of Polk County (Lead agency for Florida Continuum of Care FL-503 and lead HMIS administrator for Polk County)
Population Served:
Insights From: Katrina Panzica
Key Results:
- Coordinated entry intakes cut from 45 minutes to about 20 minutes per client
- Daily coordinated entry capacity nearly doubled from 6 to 10-15 intakes per representative per day
- By-Name List pull time dropped from about 1 hour to about 15 minutes
- Won a new $10,000-per-year diversion grant using ClientTrack reporting to demonstrate community need
- Documented an 18-month encampment response: 50 individuals identified, 30 connected to coordinated entry, 10 already housed
- Grew Continuum of Care participation, with smaller providers joining specifically for access to the shared database
20 min
coordinated entry intake, from 45 minutes
10–15
daily intakes per rep, from 6
15 min
By-Name List pull, from 1 hour
$10k
new diversion grant / year
About the Homeless Coalition of Polk County
The Homeless Coalition of Polk County is the lead agency for Florida’s FL-503 Continuum of Care and the lead HMIS administrator for the county. Its ClientTrack instance handles federal HMIS reporting for the CoC and also serves as the day-to-day database for end users and providers across the county, who log services, service projects, and housing-only projects for every client they work with.
Katrina Panzica serves as both Coordinated Entry Manager and HMIS Manager, which means she owns both the front-door process for connecting people to housing assistance and the data system that runs beneath it.
The Challenge
A Legacy HMIS That Slowed Down Everyone
Before 2023, Polk County ran on a legacy HMIS. The pain was concentrated in four places:
-
Intakes were slow.
A single coordinated entry intake could run 45 minutes, capping representatives at roughly 6 intakes per day. When 30 inquiries came in on one day, people waited. -
Reporting was manual.
Pulling the By-Name List took about an hour of exporting to Excel, filtering, and cleaning before anything was usable, and reports outside the built-in HUD set often required custom build work. -
Data quality was hard to enforce.
Required HMIS elements like gender or Social Security number were easy to skip, and end users on the ground did not always see why those fields mattered for federal compliance. -
Clients had to repeat their stories.
Notes and history did not travel cleanly between providers, so people re-told the same trauma at every door they walked into.
Why ClientTrack
Supercharging Their Capabilities
The Coalition migrated to ClientTrack by CaseWorthy in 2023. The impact was felt quickly, as Katrina recalls:
Three ClientTrack capabilities did the heavy lifting:
Workflow-enforced data capture.
Required HMIS fields are built into the workflow, so users cannot skip past them.
“Even those little elements that the end user entering may not understand the impact of, in the long run, it’s all required information to stay compliant.”
Baseline reports out of the box.
Enrollment, services, referrals, and the By-Name List are all pre-built.
“I can’t even imagine the immense amount of time with me having to build that custom report. I no longer have to. That’s already just set in baseline and all providers can utilize those reports.”
A single shared database across the CoC.
A single shared database across the CoC. Providers can see the client's full history rather than starting from zero at every intake.
Results
Coordinated Entry Intakes Cut from 45 Minutes to 20
The most measurable operational win landed inside the front-door process itself. Consistent, workflow-driven data entry took coordinated entry intakes from around 45 minutes per client to roughly 28 minutes, and then down to about 20 minutes as the team settled into the system.
Because coordinated entry is the HUD-required, ethically neutral front door that determines whether a household is routed to rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, or prevention and diversion, faster intakes mean more people are actually assessed, not just fewer minutes on the clock.
Daily Intake Capacity Nearly Doubled
Faster intakes translated directly into throughput. Where representatives were previously capped at about 8 intakes a day, they can now handle 15 to 20, which means households seeking help on a busy inquiry day no longer sit on a back burner for a week or two before anyone reaches out. As Katrina put it, that shift shows up in client morale too: People know the Coalition is there for them and do not have to wait a week for someone to reach back out.
By-Name List Reporting Dropped from an Hour to 15 Minutes
The reporting improvement was just as dramatic. The By-Name List, the operating document for any Continuum of Care, used to take Katrina about an hour to pull from the legacy database, export into Excel, filter, and clean up. Beyond the BNL, the built-in reports for enrollment, services, and referrals meant every provider in the CoC could pull their own data at live time instead of routing every request through Katrina.
A New $10,000-per-Year Diversion Grant
Better data has translated into new funding. The Coalition landed a diversion grant, worth about $10,000 per year, on the strength of the data it could now extract from ClientTrack. With reports at her fingertips, Katrina could show the funder that the assistance was needed in Polk County, who the Coalition would be able to serve, and how outcomes would be reported back, giving the funder confidence in where its dollars would land.
Exit Workflows That Close the Loop on Outcomes
The Coalition requires exit workflows on every project, giving Katrina's team clean intake-to-exit comparisons for every household and a direct read on whether funding is being used to its full capacity or whether people are falling back into homelessness.
That visibility has already sharpened oversight of rapid rehousing. When a household completes two full years of assistance and returns to the system within a month or two, ClientTrack makes the pattern impossible to miss, prompting the Coalition to ask whether providers are simply paying rent each month or actually working one-on-one with clients on their goals and resource needs. Most of the gap has traced back to case management practice, and the Coalition is using that finding to restructure how case managers work inside the database.
An 18-Month Encampment Response, Documented End-to-End
The most concrete community outcome is a large local encampment the Coalition has tracked from day one. Katrina describes the effort as a big eye-opener: the Coalition did not know at the start what the end goal would be, but now it has qualitative data to share and a real outcome to show local law enforcement as it works to build a more collaborative response to encampments.
50
individuals identified
30
connected to coordinated entry
10
already housed
One Story, One Database, Less Retraumatization
Katrina's team runs ClientTrack as an open database. Restrict-to-org and restrict-to-user settings are used sparingly so any provider a client walks in to meet with can see what has already been documented. The shared view also powers cross-provider handoffs that would otherwise stall. A client who first arrives at the Women's Resource Center can be routed to Hart for Winter Haven when they have children in the Winter Haven school system, with the receiving provider seeing the full history rather than starting a new intake.
Auditability Without Finger-Pointing
The audit trail has become a practical management tool for the HMIS team. When a required element is missing, Katrina can go straight to the user who entered the record rather than sending a blanket reminder to every provider.
Better Confidence for Case Managers, Faster Case Notes
End users have consistently flagged the same thing: ClientTrack is easier to move around in. A search bar in the top navigation gets people to the right page in a click. Katrina says every end user has told her some version of the same thing, that they have worked with a lot of databases and this one is convenient and helpful, so they can spend more time on the client and less on data entry.
Katrina is watching the CaseWorthy AI features closely, particularly the potential to auto-summarize case notes from workflow entries and to suggest case plans based on the client's record. Both would give front-line case managers more of their day back for actual client work.
A Bigger, Broader Continuum of Care
Access to a modern shared database has become a recruiting tool for the CoC itself. A few smaller providers that had not previously engaged with the Continuum of Care have joined specifically for access to ClientTrack. As Katrina puts it, organizations that were not interested in the CoC before can now see that joining means access to a database that will genuinely help their operation, which is a first step into the broader set of resources CoC membership unlocks.
What Katrina Is Most Proud Of
All in all, Katrina points to three things that she feels have made the most pronounced impact: Transparency across the Continuum Cleaner and more compliant data collection New collaborations with providers that ClientTrack has made possible.
What’s Next
Katrina’s forward-looking goal is a uniform, simplified database experience for every agency in the CoC, whether it is a one-user organization or one with 20 end users, so that small and large providers benefit equally.
She is also watching Project Unity and CaseWorthy’s data lake work closely. Several partner organizations in Polk County currently double- or triple-enter the same notes across sibling databases, and a unified data layer across ClientTrack and other CaseWorthy applications would cut significant time out of case managers’ days.
Featuring Insights From
Katrina Panzica is the Coordinated Entry and HMIS Manager for the Homeless Coalition of Polk County, the lead agency for Florida’s FL-503 Continuum of Care. A Winter Haven native with a background in psychology from Polk State College and the University of South Florida, Katrina oversees both the coordinated entry process and the ClientTrack database that supports providers and federal HMIS reporting across Polk County.
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