Warshaw Group and Health Agency Bring Mobile Technology to Pest Management

Client:

New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Challenge:

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), as part of its Childhood Asthma Initiative, needed to reduce pest infestations and the exposure of residents to harmful pesticides. The DOHMH needed a system to inspect properties, assess the extent of pest infestations and trigger notifications to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that repairs and improvements needed to be made.

Solution:

Warshaw Group developed for the DOHMH a remote data collection and transmission system to allow for inspections of potentially infested dwellings. The solution, which was deployed on 23 tablet computers to agency inspectors, allowed for inspection of the location, logging of appropriate information and instantaneous upload of the collected data to the agency’s servers via Verizon’s wireless 1xRTT network, with a specialized data security component developed by Warshaw Group.

In addition, Warshaw Group designed the system to fit with NYCHA’s procedures for inspection logging and work requests, expediting the repair process and providing for complete record tracking across agencies.

Inspection results are uploaded into databases that are custom configured for integration with industry standard statistical packages including SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) and Microsoft Access. The result is a system that speeds the inspection process, conforms to cross-agency procedures and integrates seamlessly into backend systems.