Conference for Food Protection

Modifying FDA Food Code language in Annex 3 section 8-304.11 to encourage regulatory authorities to provide copies of inspection reports to the public through website databases.

To promote access to inspection results for public health purposes, the regulatory authority is encouraged to treat the inspection report as a public document and should be encouraged to make it available, preferably electronically on a public website, for disclosure to a person who requests it as provided by Law.

Posting health inspection reports to a public website would do the following:

• Provide visibility to the results of food safety efforts at retail food establishments for all interested parties.
• Facilitate cross agency/jurisdictional data sharing for state and national benchmarking studies and become a data resource for academia, industry, consumers, and the media.
• Accommodate consumer, media, academia and industry requests for inspections data in a self-service web environment.
• Allow the development of third party web and mobile applications which provide inspection results to consumers.
• Allow corporate/business owner awareness of inspection results, engaging above restaurant leadership in the remediation of critical violations, repeat violations, inspection failure, and any other urgent inspection outcome.
• Allow the governmental agencies and industry to perform ongoing analytics of violation trends so that resources can be allocated to reduce targeted violations and improve public health and better manage poor performing restaurants.
• Facilitate corporate/business owner awareness of inspection results, engaging restaurant leadership in the remediation of critical violations, inspection failures, and any other urgent inspection outcomes.
• Allow government, academia, and industry to perform ongoing analytics of violation trends across federal, state and local jurisdictions so that resources can be better allocated to reduce targeted violations, improve public health, and manage poor-performing restaurants.

that a letter be sent to the FDA recommending that language supporting Section 8-403.50, be added to the 2013 Food Code Annex, and include language:

a. To promote access to inspection results for public health purposes, the regulatory authority shall treat the inspection report as a public document and make it available for disclosure to a person who requests it as provided by Law.

b. To encourage regulatory authorities to provide complete copies of those inspection reports, electronically to the public through website databases.

c. Informing regulatory authorities that wish to develop electronic website databases that a "white paper" discussing information technology (IT) standards and requirements is available on the CFP "Guidance and Documents" portion of the website.

d. That the Conference recommends that these activities be undertaken with the hope of eventually creating national databases from contributing states and local jurisdictions which would warehouse inspection data for public access by all interested parties.