Interview: Lancaster County’s Community Action Partnership

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Q: Can you introduce yourself and your role?

I’m Sheldon Kepiro. My official title is IT Director of Community Action Partnership, but I have a unique position where I’m also the HMIS lead for our local homeless coalition. They pay a portion of my salary, and I manage our CaseWorthy instance. We’ve implemented several Community Action Partnership programs in CaseWorthy, plus all of our HMIS-required programs.

Q: Can you give some background on your organization and the programs that use CaseWorthy?

We initially wanted all of our Community Action Partnership programs on CaseWorthy, but we recognized that would create dual intake for programs already required to use other software. So we kept a few of those separate. CaseWorthy is our main case management system for our navigators, and for all of our HUD programs — shelters, coordinated entry, outreach, and several housing programs.

Q: What measurable improvements have you seen since adopting CaseWorthy?

On the HUD side, having the required fields built in — and knowing CaseWorthy stays current with HUD regulations — means we’re not entering the wrong information. When it comes time to report, that’s what helps us submit our required reports and look at metrics to see where our needs are.

Q: How much time or effort have you saved on key processes or reports?

Being able to share one client profile — and share case notes and assessments across staff working with that same client — has been a real time saver for both our staff and our clients.

Q: What processes or workflows are significantly easier or faster now?

Workflows are one of the features I like most. As an admin, I can set up each required step so staff can’t miss anything or skip around — the workflow takes them screen by screen, and I’ve set it up so they can’t cancel out and leave something incomplete. That helps with reporting, because we know required assessments get done at entry, at annual review, and at exit.

Q: Have these improvements affected staff workload, morale, or capacity to focus on higher-value tasks?

After initial training, staff don’t have to spend much time thinking about the process — they know the workflow steps, plus a few extra pieces like logging services for billing. Then they can share case notes and services across the team to show how they’ve helped a client.

Q: Can you quantify any cost savings, reduced errors, or funding gains linked to CaseWorthy?

Through our reporting, we’ve been able to sustain our HUD funding and apply for several grants — including the Find Help integration, which we’ll get to. Being able to demonstrate strong data practices through CaseWorthy made us a good fit for the local health community and the PA Navigate initiative, and we became one of the initial Find Help integration adopters.

Q: You recently finished the Find Help integration in CaseWorthy — can you talk about how that’s going, and give some background on PA Navigate?

PA Navigate is Pennsylvania’s branded version of Find Help — similar to how we’ve branded our own CaseWorthy instance “Empower Lancaster.” It’s a statewide initiative to make referrals and, more importantly, close the loop on them — seeing whether a client was eligible, wasn’t eligible, or got help.

There was a natural learning curve early on: matching Find Help’s terminology — “seekers” and “helpers” — to CaseWorthy’s clients and users. Once we got that lined up, development began.

We chose to implement the full package rather than a lighter version. We built the full inbound integration, so Find Help referrals come directly into our CaseWorthy instance — either creating a new client or matching to an existing one — and the referral drops right into the existing referral record in CaseWorthy.

We launched in December 2025 and have onboarded two organizations so far. We’re currently creating users manually; there’s an SSO option we haven’t implemented yet, since it would mean recreating our CaseWorthy users, but we’re hoping to tackle that alongside CaseWorthy’s upcoming login experience updates.

One of the biggest differences: before this integration, we could only see a true closed loop with organizations that were also on CaseWorthy. You could make outbound referrals, but that closed-loop status didn’t come back automatically. Now it does — the receiving organization updates the referral status, and it comes back to us through the API.

Q: How has CaseWorthy helped your organization better support clients or fulfill your mission?

Mostly through the full set of case management features. We can do simple case notes, but we’ve also used apBuilder to quickly create new fields whenever we have a new data point to track — and then build a quick report to surface that information. That’s helped us support both our clients and our mission.

Q: Have you seen improvements in client outcomes, service reach, or program quality?

Coordination, especially. HUD requires a coordinated entry model so people are served consistently. HUD recently announced it’s phasing out the VI-SPDAT prioritization tool, and one complaint was that its scoring wasn’t capturing the right data points. We were able to build our own tool in CaseWorthy — the Housing Assessment Tool, or HAT — with our own questions and scoring, as a single form. That feeds a report and prioritization list so we can see who’s up next to be served.

Q: How has CaseWorthy changed your ability to collect, analyze, and report data?

We rely heavily on CaseWorthy for the compliance side of reporting — our two main HUD reports are the System Performance Measures report and the LSA. CaseWorthy maintains those required fields at the baseline level, so we’re not at risk of missing an updated HUD requirement, even though those requirements change yearly. We check data throughout the year rather than scrambling right before reports are due.

Q: Has reporting improved in terms of speed, accuracy, or frequency?

Mainly accuracy — because the required fields are always there, we don’t worry about missing data. The remaining challenge is more about data quality: making sure staff enter data correctly rather than marking it “not collected.”

Q: How does this better support compliance or accountability with funders, regulators, or partners?

It keeps us in HUD compliance, and it lets us demonstrate that data to community partners as well, especially on the homelessness side.

Q: Has CaseWorthy enabled your organization to expand services, take on more clients, or make more data-driven decisions?

I’d say it’s expanded our services. Because we’d already demonstrated system-wide data sharing, we were a strong candidate for the Find Help integration — which came to us through grant funding at no cost. That’s going to be a big asset for our clients, staff, and community, and it’ll help us tell a better story about where the highest needs are, based on referral data.

Q: Can you share a success story that shows the tangible difference CaseWorthy has made?

The one that comes to mind is what we already talked about — building the new HAT assessment. That’s probably one of our biggest wins right now.

Q: What metrics or goals are you most proud of since implementing CaseWorthy?

Probably the reporting piece again — knowing the required fields are there, that there won’t be surprises at report time, and that we can focus on data cleanup rather than chasing down missing fields.

Q: Are there outcomes you’d like to build on, or new goals you can now pursue?

We’re just one year into the Housing Assessment Tool. We want to make sure the scoring is accurate, review the questions, and see if there are follow-up assessments or efficiencies to add. We’re looking forward to evaluating what’s working and what isn’t — and with apBuilder, we can make those adjustments quickly, on the reporting side too.

Q: If you had to sum up CaseWorthy’s overall impact on your organization in a single sentence, what would it be?

For the HUD side, it’s necessary — without it, manually tracking every field and staying in compliance would take forever. CaseWorthy has been a game changer with compliance and saving time for our clients and staff.