HIFIS is like a booking software that is installed at shelters. When someone comes to a shelter and is booked in, their name, date of birth and some information such as veteran status, indigenous status or citizenship is put into the computer.
Every quarter, each of the shelters using HIFIS uploads a small sample of this data to the federal government, where it sits with ESDC currently. We use that database to do research on such things as chronic homelessness, the number of people using shelters each year, stay lengths, patterns of shelter stays, demographic trends, things like that.