Environmental Health Mobile Well & Septic Data Collection

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

Efficiency in our daily work improves the quality of the information and service we provide to our community every day. Technology is at the forefront in implementing efficient change at any county. Geographic Information System (GIS) along with mobile technology helped us provide a solution to our Environmental Health (EH) department. EH employees issuing permits for well and septic systems were required to field inspect the property, performing soil boring tests, measuring distances to roads, well heads and septic drain fields. All of this data was captured on paper and when they returned to the office they would interpret the field information to determine the best location for the well and septic system. They would also research using multiple online mapping sites for contamination, underground pipelines, wetlands, soils and more.. This workflow had many inefficiencies and limited the value of data to a permit transaction. The solution was to incorporate GIS technology along with data services from other local and state agency and provide all of this information utilizing GIS on a mobile platform. The new application allows our local regulators to have all the information available to them in the office or field. It also builds several data layers in GIS that can be overlaid with other data to improve the quality of our permitting process. The implementation of this project resulted in a reduction in data entry, the user of the application enters the data in the field one time, and they don’t have to return to the office to perform data entry. They can make recommendations immediately to the property owner if a well or drain field is in a bad location. Finally, we will have data in GIS to perform analytical queries that will maintain healthy water systems for our community well into the future.