An Integrated, Risk-informed System for Informing Food Safety Decision Making

Introduction:  A risk-informed system is integral to a decision-making framework that will address public health. With the visibility of the President’s Food Safety Working group and the new authorities in the Food Safety Modernization Act, there are unprecedented opportunities to move forward with systematic science-based, risk-informed strategies for food safety decision making. The lack of a systematic approach to decision making can result in unwanted outcomes, from a decrease in public trust to unintended consequences in the marketplace, the environment, society, and the political realm.

Purpose:  The purpose of this project was to develop a “proof-of-concept” Integrated Decision Support System (iDeSSy) for food safety risk management. Such a system must be data driven and public health focused, but it must also consider other significant components beyond public health including economic considerations, societal factors, and public perception, among others.

Methods:  iDeSSy includes a central relational database housing data on hazards, food commodities, and consumers and four individual modules for (1) ranking hazard-commodity pairs based on risk factors related to public health; (2) prioritizing hazard-commodity pairs based on decision criteria other than public health; (3) evaluating mitigation options with respect to their costs and impacts on risk; and (4) optimizing the process of resource allocation among available mitigation options.

Results:  We evaluated iDeSSy using a series of case studies to demonstrate that the system can enable decision makers to evaluate the food safety system in a comprehensive way and to follow a systematic process for evaluating food safety problems.

Significance:  iDeSSy offers a number of features that are critical in developing a decision support system including data-driven results, stakeholder involvement, transparency, flexibility, availability of multiple decision criteria, support for scenario evaluation, and optimized allocation of available resources.