Modernizing Our Country's Drinking Water Monitoring Data
By Joel Beauvais, U.S. EPA
We live in a society that allows us to get information through our phones, TVs, and computers from across the world in a matter of seconds. Although we’ve come a long way in the information age, some of our country’s most important public health information is still collected and shared using antiquated methods like manual data entry and even paper reporting.
That’s why I’m excited to announce of the launch of EPA’s new Compliance Monitoring Data Portal (CMDP), which allows water laboratories and public drinking water systems to electronically share drinking water data with their states and tribal agencies. The portal will allow us to replace the paper-based system, leading to more timely and higher-quality monitoring data. By reducing the hours previously spent manually entering data, identifying data-entry errors, and issuing data resubmittal requests, states and tribes will now be able to free up more time to focus on preventing and responding to public health issues in their communities. Once fully implemented by all states nationwide, we expect the new portal could reduce state data entry and data management work by work by hundreds of thousands of hours per year.
CMDP’s launch marks the completion of the first phase of our agency’s multi-year Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) modernization project. We are also making improvements in the development of a system called SDWIS Prime. Prime will improve state decision making by using the sample data received from CMDP to develop new reports and provide automated notifications. Prime is currently scheduled to be released in 2018.
Together, CMDP and Prime will help increase the timeliness and accuracy of drinking water data transferred between drinking water systems, primacy agencies, and EPA. Systems like these can help move our country closer to a future where all Americans will have faster and better access to information about the quality of the water that is piped into their homes.