Resources of the Week: A Handful of Health- and Safety-Oriented Databases
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

+ The Emergency Response Safety and Health Database (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health)

The Emergency Response Safety and Health Database (ERSH-DB) is a rapidly accessible occupational safety and health database developed by NIOSH for the emergency response community. The ERSH-DB contains accurate and concise information on high-priority chemical, biological and radiological agents that could be encountered by personnel responding to a terrorist event.
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The information contained in the ERSH-DB represents a compilation of material from a diverse array of sources, and is intended to address the safety and health information needs of a wide range of emergency response personnel, including, but not limited to, the fields of fire and rescue, emergency medicine, law enforcement, emergency management, public health, safety and health, and mortuary and funeral. As a central source of information, the ERSH-DB allows diverse segments of the emergency response community to share a wealth of information that is not readily accessible and to avoid duplication of effort.

+ United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Database

UNOS collects and manages all data that pertain to the patient waiting list, organ donation and matching, and transplantation occurring on the OPTN, the nation’s organ transplant network.

Includes:

• National Data (status of U.S. organ donation and transplantation on a national level)
• Regional Data (status of U.S. organ donation and transplantation by UNOS region or center)
• State Data (status of U.S. organ donation and transplantation by state or center)
• Center Data (current and historical information about individual transplant centers)
• Annual Reports (through 2007)

There’s also an option to build your own reports.

+ RePORT: Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (National Institutes of Health)

To provide NIH stakeholders with quick and easy access to basic information on NIH programs, the NIH has created a single repository of reports, data, and analysis, along with several tools for searching this database. A common classification scheme based on the traditional NIH budget categories is used to group similar reports. Several different filters can be applied to find information specific to a particular NIH Institute or Center, funding mechanism or topic of interest.

Includes the NIH Data Book:

The NIH Data Book (NDB) provides basic summary statistics on extramural grants and contract awards, grant applications, the organizations that NIH supports, the scientific workforce, and trainees and fellows supported through NIH programs. Tables and charts are provided in a variety of formats, including PowerPoint (PPT) slides and Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

+ WISQARS^TM: Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

WISQARS^TM (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) is an interactive database system that provides customized reports of injury-related data from the national Center of Health Statistics (NCHS) and the violent death data from NCIPC’s (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control) National Violent Death Reporting System.

Includes data on fatal, nonfatal, and violent injuries. Offers tutorials and frequently requested charts, tables, and reports.

+ National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) On-line (Consumer Product Safety Commission)

CPSC’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) is a national probability sample of hospitals in the U.S. and its territories. Patient information is collected from each NEISS hospital for every emergency visit involving an injury associated with consumer products. From this sample, the total number of product-related injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms nationwide can be estimated. This web access to NEISS allows certain estimates to be retrieved on-line. These estimates can be focused by setting some or all of the following variables (and an example of each):

• Date (one year maximum range; e.g., how many injuries were treated in 1996)
• Product (e.g., how many bicycle injuries occurred)
• Sex (e.g., how many injuries occurred to women)
• Age (e.g., how many injuries occurred to people aged 35-55)
• Diagnosis (e.g., how many lacerations occurred)
• Disposition (e.g., how many people were admitted to the hospital)
• Locale (e.g., how many injuries occurred at a school)
• Body part (e.g., how many injuries involved the knee)

For example, the following query could be made: number of males between the ages of 50 and 70 treated in hospital emergency rooms between February 1999 and October 1999 for injuries associated with use of a ladder at home. The response would include the actual number of cases/injuries in the NEISS sample, and an estimate for the entire nation.

Bonus Search Tool: Vivisimo Bio MetaCluster

Type a query above and Vivísimo will send your request to the PubMed, Harrison’s Online, MerckManual and TRIPDatabase search engines and parse and cluster the search results. The resulting left-side folders are made automatically from the returned titles and summaries.

Clustering makes use of a proprietary General-Science and Biomedical knowledge base of synonyms, acronyms, spelling variants, and other meaning associations which help to interpret the search results.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 and is filed under Business and Economics, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Resource of the Week, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.