Environmental Health Technology
In 2007, the Western partnership set out to completely automate its environmental health system in order to address existing inefficiencies such as county-to-county variations in data collections, lost permits, records storage problems, inability to quantify and characterize data collected, and administrative approaches. The Partnership used Incubator funds to purchase tablet computers and Food & Lodging software. Now fully implemented, training and infrastructure is in place to implement On-site Wastewater & Wells applications. By late Spring 2009, the septic tank inspections program was fully implemented in 12 of 19 partnership counties. Unfortunately, budget shortfalls will lead to many counties dropping the automated septic inspections system and they will go back to a paper system on July 1, 2009.
Resources
Incubator funds have been used to purchase hardware and software for over 70 Environmental Health Specialists across Western North Carolina.
Tools Developed
Through this automation process, the Western Partnership developed a NC-specific version of the Custom Data Processing (CDP) Food & Lodging environmental software containing all the NC forms and adopted standard procedures for their use. Before automation of the Septic Tank Program began, the partnership had to completely standardize the manual forms being used in 100 different counties IN ADDITION to standardize a single statewide set of operating policies and procedures. It was then that CDP was able to incorporate ht NC-specific Septic program into their software.
Even with the apparent demise of much of this system in July 2009 due to budget shortfalls, the standardization alone with make the program much more productive even in a paper-form environment.