New York City Teams With Information Builders to Launch Online Restaurant Inspection System
Snapshot
| Organization New York City Department of Health, responsible for protecting public health, including restaurant inspections |
| The Challenge Make health-code violation information easily accessible |
| The Strategy Create online restaurant health-code violation reporting system |
| The Results Established Internet access for people wanting to examine the sanitary inspection history of any New York City eating establishment |
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Information Builders Solution
WebFOCUS, FOCUS, |
New Yorkers not only dine out more than people in any other American city – they are arguably the most discriminating restaurant-goers in the world. This demand for excellence is especially telling when it comes to the sanitary conditions of the eating establishments they frequent. New Yorkers want to be certain that the food they eat – as well as its preparation and storage – meets the highest standards for a healthy, wholesome dining experience. So pervasive is this attitude that the city's major newspapers frequently run front-page coverage of restaurants that violate health codes.
Enforcing health-code compliance for the approximately 19,000 restaurants in the New York area falls to the New York City Department of Health (DOH). To meet rising public pressure for faster and more easily accessible information on the health code inspection status of the city's restaurants, the DOH MIS department recently partnered with Information Builders to create a state-of-the-art online reporting system.
"Information Builders Consulting played a crucial role in helping us to develop this system," says Edward Carubis, Assistant Commissioner for Management Information Services at the DOH. "Their hands-on involvement and ability to solve problems and offer alternative solutions greatly accelerated the development process."
Using Information Builders' WebFOCUS, an enterprise-class reporting solution for developing comprehensive, Web-based reporting systems, the DOH can now give citizens immediate access to any restaurant's health inspection information via the Internet.
Honoring Citizens' Right to Know
The Department of Health has always sought to honor the public's right to know about health-code compliance. It is only now, however, that the department has had the means to readily convey that information.
Prior to the new WebFOCUS system, the requirement for reporting health violation findings had always proven a difficult undertaking, both for the DOH and for the restaurant owner. New York health codes stipulate that restaurants make inspection results available to the public. However, the process required the public to call to make a request, followed by a manual search of files for the paper inspection reports. This procedure placed a heavy administrative burden on DOH staff and was not particularly effective, since it could take up to four days for the requesting party to receive the report.
Although restaurants must post signs that inform the public how to request a copy of an inspection report, many restaurants did not post these notices. The DOH felt that heightening public awareness of restaurants' health inspection status would be a powerful incentive for them to strive for clean bills of health.
Efforts were begun to create a new reporting system. In October 1998 an informal task force was formed to address the reporting requirements. This group included DOH staff and trade organizations representing the restaurants of New York.
Meanwhile, the DOH's MIS professionals were already aggressively studying e-government best practices. "We were able to make requests for government records such as birth certificates available online," recalls Carubis. "We recommended a similar type of online system for restaurant inspection reports."
Going Online
The task group quickly agreed to this approach, and the MIS professionals were charged with developing an online system, which would come to be known as the Restaurant Inspection, Recording & Reporting System, or RIRRS. Clearly, the Web was the ideal medium for getting restaurant inspection reports to all interested parties. But it wasn't immediately obvious how the information architecture should be established. "Traditionally, PCs connected to the Web had difficulty extracting information from legacy systems," comments Carubis. "Until recently, providing access to legacy databases through a Web browser was virtually unheard of."
Carubis and his team worked with Information Builders Consulting to solve this problem, using WebFOCUS. WebFOCUS not only simplifies the process of creating front-end report presentations, but also automates much of the tricky back-end integration work. In this case, that meant accessing inspection data from back-end systems, transforming that data into meaningful information, and delivering it to the Web.
Rapid Development
The DOH was already using FOCUS for application development, which simplified the learning curve for WebFOCUS. Once DOH inspectors dictated precisely what information should be made available, a complete prototype was put together in just three weeks. Developers used WebFOCUS to create browser forms through which Internet users could request detailed inspection information from the legacy system.
Here's how it works. Restaurant license information is extracted from an Adabas database on an IBM mainframe system. Inspection data is extracted from the Restaurant Health Inspections system running on an IBM RS/6000. Information from both systems is sent to a Microsoft SQL Server data mart residing on a Windows NT Server. WebFOCUS runs on the same server. When a user requests restaurant inspection information, the request is sent to a Web Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) application, which forwards the request to WebFOCUS. WebFOCUS then gathers the selected data from the data mart, dynamically generates the report, and passes it back to the IIS server, which delivers the report to the user's browser.
Meanwhile, Information Builders' EDA* middleware is used to access any updates to restaurant licensing information, which is stored on an IBM MVS mainframe, and brings these changes into the operational inspection system on the RS/6000.
A unique feature of the system is a mapping application, developed by Magellan Corporation, which rides on top of the inspection application and allows users to pinpoint the location of any restaurant. All users have to do is click on an area, or enter a zip code number, to obtain a list of restaurants in that area. From there, they can drill down to particular restaurants to obtain health inspection records. WebFOCUS then generates the report and sends it to the Web server for display on the user's browser. "It is a beautifully interactive and effective system," remarks Carubis.
A Four-Star Reception
Since RIRRS has been rolled out, the public has quickly embraced the new system. It includes lots of detailed information that Web users can query directly, making almost any level of restaurant inspection detail easily accessible to New York residents and visitors. "They can learn when the DOH last inspected a restaurant, any violations cited, and whether an establishment was closed by the Department of Health," Carubis explains. "Users can also call up a history of past DOH inspections at a particular establishment and get a good idea of its reputation for health and sanitation."
Savoring Success
RIRRS will also help the DOH fulfill its desire to be more responsive and accountable to the community. "While the online system is designed principally for public use, it also makes detailed inspection information more easily accessible by DOH inspectors and workers," says Carubis. "This is bound to help coordinate more concerted efforts by the DOH."
Best of all, the DOH believes the new system will induce New York's restaurateurs to step up their efforts to meet and even exceed food preparation and sanitation codes. "Knowing that patrons can easily access health inspection information is a significant motivation for improving sanitation," says Carubis. "People seeking a good place to eat, whether at a restaurant, hotel, or tavern, can now do so with a greater confidence in the dining environment of the establishment they choose."
For Carubis, RIRRS is a result of the DOH's forward-thinking Internet initiative, the hard work of DOH inspectors in detailing what information should go into the system, and the sophistication of WebFOCUS. "The process of extracting information from various databases, applications, and application platforms, then organizing this data into any number of reporting formats to fit different user requirements, is a formidable undertaking for any organization," he concludes. "We had pieces of the solution in other Information Builders products, but we needed WebFOCUS to complete the puzzle."
(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)
