The National Food Safety Data Exchange (NFSDX) is a Partnership of Food Protection (PFP) initiative that contributes to the development of the Integrated Food Safety System (IFSS) by enabling electronic sharing of food safety information and data between Food and Drug Administration (FDA), states, local health departments, and various regulatory partners.
The initial capabilities of NFSDX enables regulatory partners to electronically submit contracted inspection information to FDA, search FDA firm information, and conduct State-to-State Firm searches. Additional enhancements are expected in the coming months to expand NFSDX capabilities.
The first two states to electronically submit contracted inspection data to FDA and receive confirmation through the NFSDX:
- Illinois: August 29, 2018
- Florida: September 28, 2018
An additional five states (Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Texas) are actively preparing to integrate with NFSDX. These states are making significant progress on activities related to system development and integration, including establishing legal agreements.
The FDA has continued expanding IFSS support capabilities, specifically by implementing the Office of Regulatory Affairs Partners Portal (ORAPP). ORAPP augments NFSDX to provide a collaborative web platform for FDA and regulatory partners to support bi-directional information exchange. The first version of the ORAPP component was released in March 2018. In future, ORAPP will be providing regulatory partners and FDA users a role-based access to data analysis, documentation, reports, and collaboration tools to support the user community.
Currently, ORAPP is interconnected with features of NFSDX, as illustrated in Figure 1. Additional FDA initiatives are planned for integrating with other FDA systems in the future. In a similar way, the work carried out for data sharing with regulatory partners, the NFSDX team will continue to incorporate additional food safety initiatives into ORAPP.
Looking Ahead
Additional functionality is being incorporated into the NFSDX (e.g., a Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [BSE] Checklist and Seafood Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point [HACCP] services for Inspections) and ORAPP (e.g., access roles and privileges).
NFSDX and ORAPP are continuously being enhanced and the project team is gathering feedback about user experience. If you are interested in testing site functionality and would like to see what ORAPP has to offer, please contact Barbara Thiel for access: [email protected].
Updated: 10/03/2018