On April 10, the Task Distributor in the Public Health Information System (PHIS) is getting a major update. The Task Distributor is the PHIS component that each month assigns routine inspection tasks to establishments. It makes these assignments by matching information in the establishment profile with criteria specified in the Task Library. Once assigned, inspection personnel schedule inspection tasks to plan their verification activities for the month.

The new Task Distributor, combined with the updated PHIS Task Library, added in September 2023, will allow PHIS to match the assigned tasks more closely to an establishment’s actual operations. This will significantly decrease the number of unnecessary tasks that were previously assigned for many very small establishments, including those with intermittent operations. With the distributor not assigning unnecessary tasks, inspection personnel will spend less time justifying tasks as “not performed.”

The updated PHIS Task Library offers more flexibility in how Office of Policy and Program Development task designers can configure PHIS to match routine inspection tasks to establishment profile characteristics. The task designers use the library to maintain templates for all PHIS inspection tasks. The modernized library also provides more options for designers to specify how PHIS calculates the number of times each task is expected to be performed at an establishment during a given month.

The new task distributor has several new features, including:

• Runs on or about the 20th of each month to assign routine tasks for the next month, including the frequency for each task planned for each establishment shift.
• Uses more information about establishment operations to calculate the planned frequency for tasks for the month, including the approved shift schedule; dark days; no-kill days; amount of product on an average day; and number of simultaneous evisceration lines.
• Runs each night for establishments where inspection personnel changed the establishment profile or its operating schedule. During the overnight run, PHIS will add necessary tasks and adjust frequencies due to these changes. So, as inspection personnel add or remove dark days and no-kill days; add or remove HACCP volumes; or add or remove product entries, PHIS will adjust the planned number of inspection tasks in response, usually within 24 hours.

The Tasks page of the PHIS Establishment Profile will still house the current list of tasks PHIS considers eligible for each establishment shift, and inspection personnel will still be able to exclude eligible tasks when they don’t apply to an establishment shift.

Read the with updated instructions for inspection personnel on managing PHIS inspection tasks in FSIS Notice 12-24 issued April 1.