The CWHC’s Partner Portal has been a key strategic goal within the National Office for over a decade now and allows us to provide essential data and reports to Federal, Provincial, and Territorial (FPT) partners, as well as members of the public, in a timely, consistent manner. It also reduces the amount of effort that is required to provision these data and reports which allows us to “do more with less” at a critical time when we are facing increasing resource limitations and was rolled out in late fall of 2023.
The Partner Portal is increasingly becoming a secret weapon in our arsenal when it comes to making funding requests and bolstering discussions with a wide range of partners. Over the past three years the CWHC IT team have been building a stable, robust, and highly-scalable product that is highly valued among our FPT partners.
The partner portal’s framework was developed collectively by the IT team and the wider CWHC group. Extensive testing was done by the CWHC IT team and other CWHC staff. After initial testing within CWHC, the IT team worked with a few of our partners with a soft rollout of the Partner Portal. These partners provided feedback for improvements on the portal before it was fully released. These partners provided feedback on the portal and updates were made to the portal. The CWHC IT team is continually making enhancements to the Partner Portal to improve the user experience based on feedback from staff and partners. This platform is further integrated with our online reporting tools, to provide real-time information about the sightings of selected species which are monitored by our partners during disease outbreaks. The Partner Portal is also designed to allow our partners to manage their own team’s organizational access to reports and data so that they can respond rapidly to evolving wildlife health events within their jurisdictions.
Future planned functionality includes integration with external systems, as well as visualizations such as maps, graphs, and species and disease-specific information that can be provided as an educational tool for informing the public about wildlife health and disease.