Our Solutions

WIC Electronic Benefits Transfer

WIC foods DIRECT to your participants

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) helps millions of families eat well every month. CDP has processed the electronic benefits transfer (EBT) transactions behind those groceries every single day since WIC Direct went live in 2009. What started with one state agency now serves more than two-thirds of the WIC agencies in the country.

WIC Direct covers the full life of a transaction—benefit issuance, real-time authorization at the register, settlement with retailers, and reconciliation—so your staff can spend their day with participants instead of paperwork.

That same processing engine became the foundation for our other nutrition EBT solutions, including the Farmers Market Nutrition Program and Food Prescriptions. Data Direct, our business intelligence tool, is included with every Nutrition EBT solution, so the information your transactions generate is ready to use the moment it lands.

WIC Management Information Systems

DIRECT and manage participant benefits

Most of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) community knows us as an electronic benefits transfer (EBT) processor, but that is only part of the story. The clinic system—formally, the management information system (MIS)—is the heart of every WIC program. It is where families are certified, appointments are scheduled, nutrition education is documented, and benefits are issued.

We have been an active MIS provider since 1986. Forty years later, we maintain more than 30 systems in use throughout the country, and we support them under whatever contract structure fits your agency (or any combination of the three):

• Maintenance and enhancement — we keep your current system healthy and build the new functionality that policy changes require.
• Maintenance and operations — we take on the day-to-day running of the system, from help desk support through release management.
• Hosting — we run the infrastructure your system lives on, so your agency does not have to.

Any MIS we support can be integrated with Data Direct, our business intelligence tool, so certification and issuance data sits alongside your transaction data instead of in a separate report.

Farmers Market Nutrition Programs

Fresh produce DIRECT to your participants, settlement direct to farmers

A farmers market is one of the best places to buy produce, but few farmers carry the point-of-sale equipment needed to accept electronic benefits transfer (EBT) transactions. Farm Market Direct removes that barrier. As long as a farmer can reach the internet and scan a barcode, participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP), and the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) can redeem their benefits.

Farm Market Direct is flexible enough to run on real-time transaction processing or on vouchers, depending on what your program allows—so you are not forced to change the program to fit the software.

Programs get full redemption processing, settlement, and reporting at no cost to the farmer, and every transaction flows into Data Direct alongside the rest of your program data.

Food Prescriptions

DIRECT control over the foods your program provides

Your community needs access to nutritious food. You also need the peace of mind that the way you provide it will work, meet the needs of your specific program, stay secure, and produce useful data to guide future decisions. The technology to move past paper- and token-based payment systems already exists. With Healthy Food Direct, you get the benefit of it—ours—without the up-front technology investment.

Healthy Food Direct is a restricted-spend transaction processing solution that puts you in the driver’s seat from the beginning. Every item your program allows for purchase is configurable, down to the Universal Product Code (UPC) on packaged goods and the Price Look-Up (PLU) code on fresh produce. If you want to allow fresh produce, but not potatoes, you can do that. If you want to prohibit snack food purchases but allow nuts, you can do that too. The power is all in your hands (which is where it belongs, don’t you think?).

Whether the prescription is written by a clinician, issued by a community health worker, or piloted by a program you are standing up from scratch, redemption data feeds Data Direct—so you can show funders exactly what was purchased, and where.

Electronic Health Records

Automate and elevate your health department

The electronic health record (EHR) is at the heart of an effective population health solution. Most were created for private clinics, and converting them to meet the needs of a public health environment left public health providers relying on antiquated practices. Until now.

CDP is the exclusive home of ezEMRx, a full-function, certified electronic health record built for the programs public health departments actually run.

Years of research and real-world clinic experience led to the creation of ezEMRx, an EHR that brings private practice ease and functionality to the unique needs of a public health department.

We handle contract and project management, customer support, training, and data hosting, and we can add a data analytics solution when you want reporting that goes beyond the record itself. We have been providing these services for a long time; we promise you’re in good hands.

Environmental Health

Your community’s health and safety is our top priority

We’ve been doing environmental health since 1983. The solution has grown well past its humble beginnings and now covers the full lifecycle of a program: permitting, inspection scheduling, field inspections, violations and re-inspections, complaint tracking, invoicing, and reporting.

Every stakeholder gets something out of it. Inspectors spend less time re-keying paperwork, facility operators always know where their permit stands, and program managers can see what is due, what is overdue, and what is still outstanding without asking anyone to run a report.

Data Analytics

Your data, to DIRECT your business decisions.

Data Direct began as a complementary solution to WIC Direct, our electronic benefits transfer (EBT) platform for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). It was built to make sense of the myriad data points that transaction processing generates, including participation, risk management, processing metrics, food management, retail management, and financial management.

Using the Tableau front end, Data Direct transforms countless data points into graphical, meaningful information. The charts and visualizations are built to be read by program staff, not just analysts, so questions like which vendors are trending high on redemptions, or where participation is slipping, take minutes rather than a data request.

All of CDP’s solutions can be integrated into Data Direct, and so can systems we did not build—including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and management information system (MIS) or EBT platforms from other WIC vendors.

Network Services

Enterprise information technology expertise, without the enterprise payroll

Information technology (IT) evolves fast and it’s hard to keep up. As soon as you make the investment and spend the time to upgrade, odds are it’s already outdated or at risk. But what if you didn’t have to stress that anymore?

CDP’s Network Services is available to offer expert IT consulting. We will take on the heavy lifting of network management, system administration, and cybersecurity solutions—all while streamlining your operations, enhancing performance, and safeguarding your systems. You’ve got enough other stuff to worry about, let us take it off your plate and keep you ahead of the curve. You’re not just getting a tailored IT solution, but you’re also getting peace of mind. What could be better than that?

Services available include:

Custom Development

If the software your program needs doesn’t exist yet, we’ll build it

WIC Direct started as an idea that we were contracted to make a reality. Same with Data Direct. And our environmental health solution, for that matter. The point being, we know there’s a possibility you’re experiencing a need that doesn’t have an existing software solution. Yet. We can assess the problem, devise the answer, build it, and support it long after it goes live. You just have to ask. The possibilities are pretty limitless.

Services available include:

Hosting Services

Secure, stable, and designed for the critical needs of government agencies

CDP has hosted data for our customers since the very start. That will not change. Whether you need us to host a single solution or your entire public health environment, the team that supports your software is the same team that keeps it running.

All data is housed in facilities that undergo rigorous security testing and annual third-party System and Organization Controls (SOC) audits. Every employee is certified to handle protected health information in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), so the people with access to your systems are held to the same standard as the people who built them.

We are transitioning from two on-premise data centers to cloud hosting, reducing the space and energy required to operate day to day while improving resilience and capacity. Hosting is available on its own or bundled with any CDP solution, including maintenance and operations contracts.

Services available include: