Case Study: Mobile Computing, Printing Automates On-Site Inspections

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

The Marion County Public Health Department (MCPHD) serves the greater Indianapolis area, providing services that cover every element of public health, including approximately 12,000 on-site restaurant inspections. MCPHD recently automated its inspection process using mobile computers and printers.

Previously, health inspectors used hand-written inspection forms to perform their duties, leaving a carbon copy of the inspection form with the restaurant and turning in their original copy for staff to enter manually into the department's computer systems. "We had just a few people doing this data entry, and since we do thousands of inspections each year, they were always behind," says Thomas Beck, business analyst and project manager at the MCPHD.