The agency also contracted with the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health to assess the FDA's capacity to support, join or lead multistate outbreak investigations and to provide recommendations in an independent report, which we are also making public today. This report played an important role in the development of our new plan.

The Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan focuses on four specific priority areas in which improvements will have the most impact on outbreaks associated with human food:

1. Tech-enabled product traceback – Engaging smarter ways to digitize and routinely receive information needed to streamline the traceback process, which are the steps we use to pinpoint the source of contaminated foods during investigations. These tactics include obtaining more complete voluntarily provided consumer purchase data to better specify critical traceback information, facilitating and expediting how the FDA receives data, and employing more advanced analytical methods and computational approaches. We will work to harmonize our efforts with our federal, state, local and territorial counterparts, as well with industry and others involved in traceback investigations.
    
2. Root-cause investigations (RCIs) – Systematizing, expediting and sharing FDA RCIs. The plan focuses on adapting and strengthening protocols and procedures for conducting timely RCIs of foodborne illness outbreaks, standardizing criteria for producing FDA RCI reports, and expediting the release of investigation findings to industry and the public.
    
3. Strengthen analysis and dissemination of outbreak data – Working with the CDC, the USDA's FSIS and other partners to identify reoccurring, emerging and persistent strains of pathogens. Specifically, we will facilitate improvements to sharing of data with the CDC as well as other regulatory partners to further increase transparency of outbreak investigations, increase public confidence in results, and facilitate improved collaboration on investigation activities.
    
4. Operational improvements – Building on performance measures across the FDA's foods program to better evaluate the timeliness and effectiveness of outbreak and regulatory investigation activities. The FDA is committed to using performance and outcome measures to assess progress of this improvement plan by updating stakeholders, posting updates on FDA.gov and through a public webinar in early 2022 to discuss how regulatory partners, industry and others can work together to achieve these goals.

The FDA says it recognizes that today's U.S. food system is large and decentralized, with a broad array of widely distributed products, which it must adapt to in order to help ensure the safety of these products. That is why the improvement plan came to fruition, to evolve the outbreak investigations to meet modern-day needs using the most modern-day tools available. Investigations must be faster, more streamlined and more effective to identify, pinpoint and remove contaminated food from the market and identify root-cause factors in the food system to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.

Adding the Outbreak Response Improvement Plan to its arsenal, which includes FSMA and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, will ultimately prevent illnesses and save lives.