The public now has easier access to Oahu restaurant inspection reports through a new website.
Launched on Monday by the state Department of Health, the site is intended to supplement the state’s color-coded restaurant inspection placard program initiated in July 2014.
Reports on all of Oahu’s food establishments are now available, and the department wants to add reports for eateries on the neighbor islands by the end of the year.
The department said there are more than 10,000 food establishments statewide, about 6,000 of them on Oahu. On Hawaii island there about 1,800; on Maui, 1,700; and on Kauai, 700. Included in the food safety inspection program are restaurants, hotels, caterers, food warehouses, markets, convenience stores, lunch wagons, pushcarts and institutional kitchens for health care facilities, schools, adult and child day care centers and prisons, according to the DOH.
“What this system does now … it opens up our whole government regulatory program to complete transparency where everyone can view and see what my inspectors actually see during inspections,” said Peter Oshiro, manager for the food safety inspection program, at a news conference Monday.
“For the Health Department I think this is a real milestone that we reached. To do a project like this takes a lot of effort and a lot of work,” said Oshiro.
Before the website, anyone seeking an inspection report had to go to the department and “look through reams and reams of file cabinets.”
“It’s very difficult to retrieve literally tens of thousands of hard-copy reports,” he said.
The website includes a mapping feature for each establishment, linked to its inspection reports.
The new online system, designed by Digital Health Department Inc. at an estimated cost of $158,000, took approximately nine months to construct. Restaurant permit fees were used to pay for it.
Digital Health will monitor and maintain the website, with new inspection reports posted within 24 hours.
At the end of January, 11,900 inspections had been conducted statewide under the food safety placard program in which the issuance of a green placard indicates an establishment has passed inspection, yellow indicates a conditional pass and red triggers immediate closure due to permit suspension.
According to Oshiro, 2,307 restaurants have been issued yellow conditional-pass placards, indicating a major violation remained uncorrected after a routine inspection or two or more major violations were observed during a routine inspection, whether corrected or not at the time of the inspection.
To view the new Hawaii restaurant inspection website, visit hi.healthinspections.us/hawaii.