Background The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) records information about consumer product-related injuries from a probability sample of emergency departments, and makes these records publicly available. NEISS is used for injury research and to guide decisions about product recall, set product safety standards, and develop public awareness campaigns. The NEISS data contain both structured and unstructured fields. However, the current NEISS query builder system only allows structured data query.

Methods We redesigned the online data query system and created RE:fine NEISS to enable both structured and unstructured data query while enhancing the user experience. Our design goals were to provide real-time feedback, reduce the cognitive load for users and offer advanced functionalities.

Results The RE:fine NEISS significantly improves the usability of the NEISS. As the user builds a query, a sample of the matching subset of data is populated in real-time and is updated each time the user modifies the query. The auto-complete lookup feature for product names makes finding products easier. In addition, the unstructured text search capability allows users to add as many conditions as they want for any field search for keywords, phrases and wildcards, apply nested Boolean queries, and exclude conditions. Furthermore users can save, share, and reuse their queries.

Conclusions A group of injury researchers, familiar with NEISS, assisted with the development and evaluation of RE:fine NEISS. These users found that they could easily generate queries, readily view the data in a friendly format, quickly assess project feasibility, and produce the desired dataset for more detailed study. RE:fine NEISS is available online at http://injurysearch.nationwidechildrens.org/