FDA touts online performance metric dashboards

The Food and Drug Administration received 5,066 Freedom of Information Requests in the first half of this calendar year, according to a recently unveiled online dashboard that's part of the Health and Human Services Department open government effort.

The dashboard belongs to an initiative dubbed FDA-TRACK that will publically monitor more than 100 FDA program offices with quarterly online updates. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the online dashboards will counteract a history of opaqueness at the agency, bringing it "into the daylight."

As for the FDA's FOIA requests, available data on the dashboard shows that they remain relatively stable on a month-to-month basis, averaging around 5,000 a month with a maximum range of 309 requests. The dashboard provides FOIA request numbers from October 2009 through June 2010. The agency routed the greatest percentage of the requests--24 percent in all--to the FDA's commissioner's office.

For more:
- go to the FDA-TRACK website
- download the most-recently revised HHS open government plan (.pdf)

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