Environmental Health Web-Based Inspection System - Project in Brief
This NACCHO project is made possible through an exciting partnership with Paragon Bermuda (Canada) Ltd., a technical services firm that provides Web-based application design, development, testing, and implementation for a variety of environmental health programs, including food safety, swimming pools, and septic tanks. For more detailed company information about Paragon Bermuda, visit www.paragoncda.com/cmsParagon/.
Background
For the past six years, NACCHO has worked to improve our understanding and awareness of the needs within local food safety programs. One of the largest gaps in local health departments' food program capacity is the absence of electronic, streamlined, and cost-effective management of inspections, inspection reports, and results. To address this need at the local level, NACCHO has embarked upon this collaboration with Paragon.
Purpose
This project markets and promotes a Web-accessible system for local health departments that does the following:
- Uses a "What You See Is What You Get Approach" to inspection-form development. Paragon's input screens will look exactly the same as the paper forms inspectors are used to working with, thereby reducing the amount of training required.
- Allows inspectors to use a variety of equipment (desktop, laptop, tablet, etc.) to interface with the application and work while connected or disconnected to the Internet.
- Includes all of the functionality required by the Inspection Business Process including:
- Secure access by authorized personnel
- Automatic scheduling of inspections based on risk category
- Scheduling of ad hoc inspections such as complaints
- Re-inspection and complaint tracking
- Repeat and violation calculation
- Scoring (optional)
- Issuance and tracking of notice documents
- Re-assignment of inspections or establishments by managers
- Management reporting
- Extensive customization including:
- Use of your own food code and violations
- Editing the violations library
- Values in all picklists used
- Registration of users by an authorized person
- Provides consistent, accurate, and up-to-date information to the public via the Internet (optional).
- Is provided (optional), as a hosted service, which is secure and guaranteed to be virtually approximately 100 percent of the time.
- Is extremely cost effective for small to mid-sized health departments.
- Uses Electronic Signature Capture; signatures are saved as encrypted, "electronic ink," which means there is no need to keep paper copies in the office.
Major Activities
June 2005 – Held a focus group to solicit feedback from the locals on the functionality of the application and to get input on the kind of reporting that different levels (federal, state, local) of government might want/need.
July 2005 – Presented the application at the NACCHO/ASTHO Annual Conference in Boston. This included a demonstration of the application, a booth exhibition ,and testimonials from focus group participants.
December 2005 – Initiated the marketing and promotion of the new system to local health departments.
For more information about the online food safety inpection system, including how to purchase it for your health department, please e-mail paragon@naccho.org or call (202) 783-5550 and ask to speak with a member of the food safety team.
