The Contaminants and Threat Agents team is seeking to award a cooperative agreement for providing and maintaining, in its current active state, a secure online Information Sharing Exchange (ISE) software solution called the FERN communication, collaboration and management (CCM) portal.
Donor Name: Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 05/15/2023
Size of the Grant: $260,000
Grant Duration: 1 year
Details:
The Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) comprises federal, state, and local government regulatory laboratories with varying capacities to perform food defense and emergency response testing. The Contaminants and Threat Agents team of the Laboratory Quality Assurance, Response and Coordination Staff in USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) manages a cooperative agreement program to fund external partners and projects supporting FERN. The Contaminants and Threat Agents team is seeking to award a cooperative agreement for providing and maintaining, in its current active state, a secure online Information Sharing Exchange (ISE) software solution called the FERN communication, collaboration and management (CCM) portal. The infrastructure supporting the FERN customized portal is named “CoreSHIELD”. The CoreSHIELD platform provides the information technology architecture underlying a suite of web-based portals and applications. This tool provides the FERN with capability, capacity, and readiness data for the network member laboratories. The data housed in this system is not captured in any other system and is the only tool available to FERN to determine national capacity and capability for laboratory testing needed to respond to a foodborne emergency.
The FERN Portal provides for: (1) training event registration and historical tracking of attendees; (2) secure video and webinar capability available 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 for all current FERN lab members; (7) activation management and results data entry database for all members during exercise and actual activation events; (8) a FERN documents repository, including housing all FERN methods, operational SOP’s and other network documents, complete with search functionality for all capabilities of network members; (9) FERN Calendar of events automatically populated from each network event scheduled within the website functional arena, (10) document management including real time collaborative editing, approval workflows and digital signatures, (11) large and sensitive file sharing with risk mitigation and activity auditing, (12) 24 hour helpdesk assistance and online management of user accounts. Each module, 1-12, is organized with data output/reporting in the format and manner specified by FERN.
Funding Information
- Estimated Total Program Funding: $260,000
- Award Ceiling: $260,000
- Award Floor: $187,000
- Period of Performance: One year award, renewable for up to 5 years total depending on availability of funds.
Eligible Applicants
Public and State controlled institutions of higher education and National Associations/Organizations whose purpose is to represent and support State food regulatory programs are eligible to apply for this funding opportunity. Award recipient is to already have an established relationship with the CoreSHIELD technology owner, Datastream Connexions, to ensure continuity of database operations.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
