USDA FSIS Offering Grant for FERN Communication Portal Maintenance

The Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) currently comprises federal, state, and local government regulatory laboratories with varying capacities to perform threat agent testing. The FERN division in USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is seeking to award a cooperative agreement for providing and maintaining, in its current active state, a secure communication and collaboration portal which will provide the FERN with capability, capacity and readiness data for the network member laboratories. In addition, this portal will provide for: (1) training event registration and historical tracking of attendees; (2) Just in time training with video and webinar capability to multi-agency participants; (3) proficiency test event registration and historical tracking of participants; (4) public webpage maintenance and enhancement; (5) FERN Storeroom online, secure ordering and inventory maintenance; (6) capability and capacity information available from first day of award date; (7) Activation management and results data entry database for all members during exercise and actual activation events; (8) FERN repository, including housing all FERN methods, operational SOP’s and other network documents, complete with search functionality for all capabilities of network; (9) FERN Calendar of events automatically populated from each network event scheduled within the website functional arena, (10) 24 hour helpdesk assistance and online management of user accounts,  and each data set (1-10) will be organized with data output/reporting in the format and manner specified by FERN.