Most Restaurant Inspections In Philadelphia Area Now Posted Online
By Pat Loeb
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - An effort by the Pennsylvania Agriculture Department to put health inspections for every restaurant in the state online is entering its third year (see earlier story). Officials say they're making progress.
Lydia Johnson would like you to know this is no easy task. "We do 40,000 inspection reports a year and the rest of the state probably has another 60,000 inspection reports."
Johnson is director of the Bureau of Food Safety, charged with implementing the 2011 law to standardize health inspections. She says it took more than a year just to complete step one, which was to build a software program that all the department's inspectors could use.
"This was not a canned product. We had intense involvement."
Johnson says now that it's in use-- and 60 of the 170 local governments that do their own inspections are also using it-- the state is putting reports online. Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery and Chester Counties have their own sites.
Click here to view the Department of Agriculture inspection database.
To view the various databases in the Philadelphia-area counties, follow the links below:
