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The Open Path Story

A Better Way to Find Housing

Every component, feature, and function in Open Path has a story — and a community partner — behind it.

The platform started in 2015 as a custom software development project for the City of Boston: They were looking to create a fair and efficient way to manage coordinated access to housing; they wanted service providers to have access to client records spanning multiple organizations and systems; and they needed to combine data from multiple HMISes for CoC-wide reporting. They also wanted to create a shared and collaboratively supported resource that could benefit others.

What we built was the start of Open Path, initially an HMIS Warehouse and Coordinated Access platform, released under the “copyleft” GPLv3 license — making the code freely available to all, with a stipulation that contributions and derived work also be released under GPLv3.

Homeless Management Information System...and More

Early Open Path development focused on areas where traditional HMIS implementations failed — the innovative data integration, coordinated care, and reporting features not in other vendor solutions. A decade later, and thanks particularly to a partnership with Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Open Path still provides those things — as well as being a highly usable, full-featured HMIS, with data management tools designed to support the real daily needs of service providers and lead agencies.

Today, Green River provides Open Path as Software as a Service to Boston, Allegheny County, and more than a dozen other organizations, large and small, who in turn contribute to the platform’s growth and ongoing evolution.

Our Story