I would like to ask everyone to be seated please, so we can go ahead and get started.
[ Silence ]
Thank you for coming today. This is the first day of our two day series of workshops on the establishment of a publically searchable consumer product safety information database. I am Mary Kelsey, director for the Division of IT Policy and Planning and the Office of the Chief Information Officer. And before we get started, I am just going to go over some ground rules for these discussions and just give you some direction. The start time for both days is 9 a.m. and we are going to try to wrap this up about 4 o'clock every day. Please keep the discussions on topic. We are reserving the right to move on. Be considerate of the time. We want to make sure that everyone's opinion and viewpoint is heard today. I also want to remind everyone that these workshops are being webcast live. So we would like to remind everyone not to do anything that they wouldn't want seen on You Tube tomorrow. For those individuals listening over the internet, questions can be emailed to and this is all one word shopquestions@cpsc.gov. We will read your questions at some point during the workshop. This morning's workshop topic is data analysis and reporting and the afternoon session is reports of harm. We are going to have one 15 minute break during each session and we are going to break for about an hour at lunch. We will try to wrap things up between 11:30 and noon for the [inaudible]. If you check your handouts, you should find a map of the area with a list of eateries that are within walking distance of the building. The restrooms are located directly across from the elevators. So now that we have gotten the important business out of the way, I just want to say a few words about the workshops themselves. These workshops actually serve a dual purpose. First, we hope they will help us design and develop an accessible and user friendly database tool that is useful and beneficial for our stakeholders to more easily search and retrieve information on consumer products and reports of harm related to the use of consumer products. Second, we are seeking comment and input through these workshops for the related interpreted role on the publically searchable consumer products safety information database. Workshops are unique in that CPSC is asking for comments prior to issuing a proposed rule. We are doing this because we want your input, but we are not here to debate the merits of the statute. We are here to discuss how to implement it in a way that is useful for all of our stakeholders, CPSC, consumers and industry. We thank you for your interest in the public database and we encourage everyone's candor and participation. We are interested in hearing and understanding everyone's point of view and during these workshops, we are going to be capturing your comments live on the screens. We will be projecting them on the screens and we want to make sure that we have accurately captured everyone's comments. So if during the break or after the workshop is over, please come up and let us know if we have captured something incorrectly. I want to remind everyone that we are continuing to accept written comments through January 29th. So if you have additional comments or inputs that result from these workshops, please submit them through the CPSC office of the secretary through that date. The email address is CPSC-OS@CPSC.gov. At this time, I would like to introduce the chairman of the US Consumer Products Safety Commission, Inez Tenenbaum.
[ Applause ]
Hi everyone, good morning, thank you. We are so delighted that all of you have joined us today at the CPSC headquarters and those who are turning in over the internet. You know I am Inez Tenenbaum and we want to, I and the staff want to welcome you for this two day workshop giving us information on how to and your ideas on establishing the consumer product safety incident database. We are so happy to have you here participating in these workshops. Section 212 of the CPSA amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to create a new section 6A of the CPSA entitled Publically Available Consumer Product Safety Information Database. It states that the commission shall establish and maintain a database on the safety of consumer products and other products or substances regulated by the commission. The statute declares that the database must be publically available, searchable and accessible through the commission's website. These workshops are a part of our ongoing CPSA implementation and they are focused on the collection and the development of public and stakeholder input. We intend that the product safety be a great tool for all of our stakeholders and that is why you have been asked to be here today. These workshops are the beginning of an ongoing discussion, because we want your views. We think your views are invaluable on how we structure this public database and they are very important to us. So I look forward to a robust discussion from all of you over the next two days, as our staff seeks to become better informed about the issues you face and the possible approaches to the choices ahead of us. As we are at the beginning, your input really is important and it is a great opportunity to help us understand and shape the design of things to come. Now before we start the first workshop, I want to personally thank all of the panelists who have joined us today and I want to emphasize that we are so grateful for the efforts that you took to travel here, to prepare for this workshop and we look forward to hearing from you so that we can build the best public database possible. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you Chairman Tenebaum. At this time, I would like to ask our CPSC staff panelist to introduce themselves, Mr. Weddle, I am sorry, Melissa, can we start with you?
I am Melissa Hampshire, I am the assistant general counsel for enforcement and information in the office of general counsel.
I am Pat Weddle. I am the chief information officer at the commission.
Tim Smith, I am an engineering psychologist with the Division of Human Factors here at the commission.
My name is Ming Drew. I am the Project Manager for the risk management system, which the database is a part of. I work for the Office of CIO.
Good morning, I am Russ Roegner. I am the Director of Epidemiology at CPSC.
Kathleen Stralka, I am a statistician and Director of the Division of Hazard Analysis.
Good morning, I am Carolyn Manley, the team leader of the Children's Product Team and Regulatory Enforcement Division of the Office of Compliance.
Okay, thank you, before beginning each workshop, staff from CPSC's office of the general counsel will present a brief overview of the part of the CPSC statute that the workshop is addressing. So I am going to turn things over to Melissa Hampshire.
In your packet of information is an unofficial compilation of Section 6A of the Consumer Product Safety Act, which deals with the implementation of the database and the requirements. So I am going to just briefly run through this, just to set the context for this particular workshop. As with all the workshops, I would like to say that the views expressed here are those of the staff and do not reflect the views of the commission, do not necessarily reflect the views of the commission. As this is laid out on the slide, the Section 6A requires the commission to establish the database on the safety of consumer products and other products or substances regulated by the commission. And as the chairman stated, the database must be publically available, searchable and accessible through the internet website of the Commission. The database has to be up and running by March 2011. We submitted a plan, an implementation plan to Congress in September 2009 and that implementation plan is on the website for those of you who would like to see it. Briefly with respect to contents, the database is going to contain reports of harm that are defined as illness, injury or death or risk of illness, injury or death related to the use of consumer products or substances regulation by the Commission. It will also contain information the Commission derives from mandatory recall notices that is sections 15C of the respective provisions of the Consumer Product Safety Act and the FHSA, in any notice of a voluntary corrective action, taken by a manufacturer about which the Commission has notified the public. In addition, it will contain manufacturer's comments regarding reports of harm and consistent with Sections 6A and B of the Consumer Product Safety Act, which are provisions dealing with public disclosure of information, it will contain any additional information that the Commission determines is in the public interest. We are going to cover the reports of harm provision in session two. The information under Section 15C in the Voluntary Corrective Action Plans we are going to cover in session five; the manufacturer comments we are going to cover in section three and again the 6A and B information that is consistent with release, we will also cover in section five. Briefly on the organization of the database, the statute contains requirements for how the database should be organized and the Commission is required to categorize the information in a manner consistent with the public interest in such a manner that it determines will facilitate easy use by consumers. The Commission is required to ensure to the extent practicable that the database is sortable and accessible by the date that a report of harm is submitted for inclusion, the name of the consumer product or other product or substance regulated by the Commission, the model name, the manufacturer or private labeler's name and such other elements as the Commission determines is in the public interest. By statute, the Commission cannot disclose the submitter's name and contact information in the database. That concludes by brief summary of the provisions that are relevant for this workshop and we will be having just a brief overview of the statutory requirements at the beginning of each workshop. I will return back to Mary Kelsey.
Thank you Melissa. At this time, I am going to turn everything over to James Devereaux who is going to be facilitating these workshops and he will give us a brief overview of the format of the sessions, James?
So I want to add my welcome to everyone and thank you very much for coming today. What I would like to do before we get going is just spend a few minutes to set a little context and kind of give you an idea of what we are looking for today, lay out a few of the ground rules, there really aren't many and kind of how we see this working out. I think first and foremost, the idea behind these workshops, we are currently in the process of designing this public database. We have got actually quite a few folks in the room today who are on the team that working on the requirements and the design for the public database. In the process of doing that, a number of very detailed questions have come up and we have of course within the agency had a number of meetings on these questions, but we also recognize the importance of getting the public's input on these questions. So what we would like to do today and really the focus here is to have an interactive dialogue between CPSC staff and the members of the panel, around some specific questions. Having said that though, this is a very open forum, so we are going to start out with some very specific questions, I am hoping and I imagine those are going to lead into some other questions, some details, back and forth. That is really what we are looking for here, so think of this more as a dialogue then a testimony. So having said that, a couple points, first of all, we are going to be capturing, Pat Doherty, my colleague is going to be capturing notes real time, as we go through this with an eye on capturing things like decision points, issues, outstanding items and in particular something we call a parking lot, which is if we get to a point in the discussion where we maybe veer of topic a little bit, we go down a path that may be suited for one of the other workshops, we don't want to lose the essence of that idea, but we would like to focus this workshop on just the data analysis and reporting piece. So if we do get down that path, I will jump in ask Pat to capture that in the parking lot. We will refer that to either the appropriate workshop or we will take that conversation offline after this workshop. A couple more notes, I am sure that you are all used to and familiar with the microphones in front of you. For those of you who aren't, push the button once to speak, to turn the microphone on, push the button again when you are finished. When your microphone is live, you will see a red light. One thing about these microphones though, only four can be on at any given time, so out of respect for your colleagues and your fellow panelist, please when you are finished speaking hit the button and turn it off. If at any given time, we do have four people and you hit your button to speak and you get a green light that means you are in the queue. If your green light is flashing, you are next in the queue and as soon as someone turns off their microphone yours will turn on. Mine works all the time I am told, so if we do end up in a situation we have a bunch of people competing to speak, I will jump in and try to moderate that. But really I view my role here as being a very light sort of facilitative role, quite honestly if I don't have to say a single word up here, because we have got great dialogue back and forth between the two sides, I am thrilled with that. So the second thing I want to bring up is audience participation. We would like to invite the audience to come up with their questions. We are asking though that you hold those questions until the end of the discussion. So the format for this morning is going to be two separate sections, we will have a 15 minute break in between. At the end of each of those sections, we will reserve some time for audience questions. We have got a microphone set up in the back. We would ask that, I will call out when we are getting close to the time, we ask that you come up to the microphone with those questions and I will give the panel a heads up of a brief time warning as we get closer to that so we can wrap up whatever conversation we are having at that point. So with that, what I would like to do to start things out is ask each one of our panelists to give a brief introduction, name, organization you represent and ask that you keep it under a minute with the introduction and then we will get things going. So Brad, if I can ask you to start.
Good morning, my name is Brad Brush. I am general counsel for Lasco Products out of Westchester, Pennsylvania, we manufacture primarily of consumer products, fans and heaters in particular, thank you.
Good morning, Mark with the association of home appliance manufacturers based here in Washington DC.
Henry Delima, a consultant in McClain, Virginia and we have developed the household products database for the National Library of Medicine which contains over 10,000 products for which we have ingredients and health effects.
I am George Rutherford. I am with the Ingall Consulting Group. For those that don't remember, I spent more than 30 years at CPSC in a lot of different capacities, almost all of which were something to do with the collection or analysis of injury, incident and damage data.
Good morning, Steve Lamar with the American Apparel and Footwear Association. We are a trade association of apparel and footwear producers and distributors and sellers, both children's and adult products and our members include both apparel and footwear company, as well as many other suppliers to that industry.
Good morning, my name is John Dadovich. I am the director of product assurance with Hamilton Beach brands in Glen Allen, Virginia. Hamilton Beach Brands is a manufacturer and distributor of small kitchen appliances.
Good morning, this is [inaudible] with Inta-tech, we are interest in seeing the incident data to be more widely and effectively used for injury prevention and safety promotion. I am a researcher at Inta-tech, thank you.
Good morning, I am Nancy Coles, I am the director of Kids in Danger. We are a non-profit based in Chicago that works on children's product safety. We were founded in 1998 by parents who lost a son in an unsafe crib that had been previously recalled and yet information about that product was not widely available, which is our interest in the database.
Good morning, my name is Dia, I am policy counsel with Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports Magazine. We thank the commission for this workshop and for the chance to comment.
Good morning, my name is Phil Zipperman, I am the deputy chief of the Maryland Consumer Protection Division. We maintain our own database of consumer complaints that is annually received in excess of 12,000 consumer complaints a year. Thank you for the invitation.
Good morning, I am Sean Cane with CT Research and Strategies. We are a research consulting and advocacy firm based in Massachusetts. We work on motor vehicle and consumer product safety. We have a commercial system using the Nitsa [assumed spelling] complaint data and have a familiarity with consumer complaint data and how to use that in the context of injury prevention.
Okay thanks very much, so with that I would like to get things kicked off. You each have probably seen in our public announcement and in your packets in front of you. We have a list for this particular workshop of six questions and I am going to go through those questions very briefly. The first is should the CPSC design the online incident reporting form to insure the capture of data that can be used in scientific statistical analysis, if so, how? Second, what can CPSC do from a system design perspective to ensure the accuracy of submitted data? Third, what can CPSC do from a system design perspective to ensure the ongoing and perpetual integrity of submitted data? Fourth, in what format should they make data available to the public and why? Fifth, what types of data analysis and reporting tools used by third party analysts in the public and industry, what are these tools relative merits and drawbacks? And finally, what data sets including information from reports of harm and mandatory and voluntary recall notices should be made available for public searching and reporting and why? As I said before, we would like to keep this particular forum focused on data analysis and reporting. I imagine we are going to veer off these questions a little bit, but what I would like to do is start actually with the last question on this list pertaining to data sets and I would like to actually at this point open it up to our panel, if anyone would like to comment on this particular question?
[Inaudible] though Sean I am going to call on you, I know I spoke to you briefly before about this, I know you have made a lot of comments on this in the past and in public forums here at the agency, if you would like to give a quick response to that?
I think in terms of providing additional data beyond the complaints, what we find for consumers or research, folks who are using the data, they are frequently looking for information on a product for you to purchase it or research that project. And that is going to include looking at more broadly, what are the recalls that affect that product? I know the agency has a recall database, but thinking about how we can incorporate in a simple tool that will allow a consumer to search once for a product and be able to pull back information on recalls. I think it would also make a lot of sense for closed investigation information to be available, readily available for folks in a way that they can see what has been done past on that. that is really important and maybe the integration of other data sets, like the nice data again giving you the ability to cross many of these and that is what we have done in our crucial database and we find that a lot of our users find it being very powerful and useful tool, so looking at across many data sets. Because the reality is one data set isn't going to answer your question.
Okay thank you, maybe if we could get someone from CPSC to respond to that briefly. Talk a little bit about some of what we have talked about so far internally within the agency with regard to data. One other note, let me just say this. Since we are capturing notes real time, if at any point, you feel like we have misrepresented your view point, please let's fix that as quickly as possible. Don't hold that in. Could we maybe get someone from the CPSC side to talk about that, Ming?
I will speak to that, actually I have a follow up question on that as well. I mentioned the risk management system as what I am leading and the database is a part of that. So as an overall strategy for the risk management system, we are not looking just at incident reporting. We are looking at really the whole life cycle from incident to the investigation to actual recall, if necessary. At what stage do we make what information available, I think that is one of the questions we need your help with. You mentioned an IDI, as the incident investigation or the in-depth investigation is happening, do we want to notify the public at that point. What if the investigation turns out to not result in a recall or a product safety related issue, what mechanism do we have to go back and sort of let people know there is not a problem, don't worry about it. So once you can make that incident investigation, people sort of have their antennas up and raise flags, we also don't want to make people nervous unnecessarily. So that is one of my follow-up questions to you is, how do we determine at what stage do we make information available?
You know let me draw on my experience with Nitsa on that. I think what we see with the Nitsa data for example, when the agency opens an investigation that is public. The agency is transparent in terms of its investigation and indicates this is simply the beginning process, you know, they have several layers of investigative process that begin with preliminary evaluation to an engineering analysis and these levels are described and the public knows what those levels are. So simply because the agency opens an investigation, doesn't mean everything is broken loose here, I think the issue from an ideal standpoint, I think transparency and what the agency is doing is beneficial to the agency and consumers. It is all on the table, here is what is happening. If it turns out nothing comes out of that investigation, fine, it simply this is our inquiry and this is what we are doing. In an ideal world, I think that is certainly where you should be looking.
Let me at this point kind of jump in. We have had a little bit of conversation around what sorts of data gets made available and when, what are the mechanisms, what does that data look like. Obviously from statute, there are certain data types that we are required to release, this dialogue is really about maybe some of the other data, whether or not we release that. For example, you know incident reports or follow up actions on incident reports. There is also talk, as I am sure everyone is aware, about the openness initiative and the government making data available on data.gov, just want to see if anyone has any reaction to that thought. George?
Just a quick thought, I think there may be a little issue that needs to be cleared up when people talk about investigation, because obviously you have got your in-depth investigation, which is a data bit, which is a follow up to an incident report. And then you have got an entire briefing package, which you could also refer to as a CPSC investigation. I think we need to differentiate the two, I mean from my point of view, I would say any in-depth investigation that is completed and goes into the file ought to made available to the public and we can worry about how we link the two documents later in our discussion, but I wanted to make sure we kept that separate and didn't get confused when we start thinking about oh well we have engineering's memo and human factor's memo and all these other things worked into it that someone else might very well call a CPSC investigation.
Okay.
The other consideration is who you are going to link that information to and we and I don't know if I can speak for all the attorney generals, but I can certainly speak for the Maryland Attorney General, but we in the Attorney General community would like to get as much information as we can, as early as possible, so that we can understand what the CPSC is doing, and in fact either partner or join your efforts where that is appropriate.
Okay, any response or further follow-up from the CPSC side at this point?
I am not sure if it is appropriate for this particular section, but one of the things we are looking at for the database is the type of, providing a role based access, basically depending on what type of user you are, exposing not just, well exposing a different way of searching for data. You know for example, a medical professional may have a different way of looking at data then an attorney general, so that is probably something else we need to discuss. I don't know if James that is a parking lot issue, but you know how would manufacturers like to use this data base versus consumers versus attorney general.
Can I briefly respond? There is a good deal of precedent with regard to state and federal agencies sharing information among law enforcement. I will use for example the FTC's Consumer Sentinel database. Now Sentinel is severely limited when it comes to public access, but they do provide fairly broad access to state law enforcement and vice versa. We in the various state agencies, whether they are licensing authorities, consumer protection divisions and so on and so forth have levels of access that we provide depending on the user and the greatest level generally speaking would be for law enforcement purposes.
If I could chime in on that too, I just think that one of the things if you are looking at the front end of this, so we look at again drawing on our experience with Nitsa, you have got a consumer front end on the Nitsa site and then you have the ability to download the raw data for other users and I think that is a really important aspect, because many of us in this room here are going to be much more interested in obtaining the raw data and dumping it into our own systems and analyzing it, whether it is the attorney general or consumer's union or our organization or manufacturers. Ultimately, I think that serves many users without a whole lot of added you know, layers of bureaucracy that needs to be put into a system. It is a friendly system, you want to analyze it in more detail, here are the raw files, you can download and import yourself into any of the number of available commercials.
I would like to carry on that point for a second if we could. Speaking about raw data, what are some good examples right now of the ways that either industry or associations or external groups are using that raw data, what kind of format would it be useful for that to come in, etc, etc. Ami?
Sorry James, I wanted to jump back very quickly to one point.
Please do, don't let me interrupt here.
You mentioned the point of different users, whether it be health care professionals or industry and we have submitted this in our comments, but the thing that I do want to stress that the end user as determined by the statute is meant to be the consumer, so we would just urge that be kept in mind as the main end user, not to take away from other useful utilizers of the database.
And that is a very good point, I think that while it is important for us to provide data that is easily searchable by a program, web services or whatever it may be, the general public is not going to download a file of X number of megabits. It is not going to be useful for the general public. That is a very good point, thank you.
James I wonder if we can go back to the original question in terms of the data sets, including information from reports of harm and mandatory and voluntary recall notices. I think it is also important to remember that we are going to be dealing with tens of thousands of potentially of consumer comments that are going to be coming in. As is presently the case, CPSC is only able to investigate through an IDI a small number of the existing ones and so it would be a little difficult to consider that by adding in the IDIs before they are completed that they would have any real benefit. I think that all of us want accuracy and integrity to this database. The last thing we want is for consumers to be going off and thinking that something is happening and this become a blog spot on the internet. I think back to what the law specifically says in terms of the data that is to be entered that I think the more that we can keep this as simple as possible, the more beneficial this will be to consumers. And as Ami pointed out, this is for the benefit of consumers. I think to the extent that it will be useful to other organizations and groups that is all good, but if we can keep in mind the simplicity of this and allow the consumer to be able to find the information, to be able to sort the information the way they want to, the benefit will be as Congress intended it.
I guess can we sort of split this up into two questions then. One sounds like we need to talk about what type of data set should be or is most useful for organizations, whether it be a Consumer's Union or manufacture or attorney general, but another how should we present this information for the general public, who doesn't have access to a program, to a machine that lets them, sifts through the data set. So I guess James going back to your first point, let's talk about data set so for manufacturers and attorney general and trade organizations, what type of data set, what would you like to see in those data sets, you would like to get from the CPSC.
So yes please, Nancy?
Just on the type of information, I think from a consumer viewpoint, as well as these other organizations, part of the reasoning behind setting up a public database is because CPSC currently has safety information about products that is not being public and so consumers are continuing to buy the product that there may be incidents on that you are investigating or have finished investigating, maybe negotiating with the manufacturer on a recall, but it hasn't happened yet, consumers continue to use those products, buy them and so I think any information that CPSC has, I mean with the database set up, now the calls and complaints that often start your idea that initial call will now be public from the beginning, because it will go through this system from the consumer. So it seems to be that the sooner you can get your IDI information matched up with that, the better, because you will in fact have more information then you have from that initial consumer call, which is now going to be public from the beginning. So if there is other information, whether it is an IDI, whether it is [inaudible] data that can be matched up with that particular incident or you know wherever else the medical examiner reports that you get, all that information I think, the more that is out there, the more that the public can make informed choices.
And I think that goes back to Wayne's concerns, how would you call out those investigations that haven't been, there is no conclusion yet, how do you prevent a false alarm?
Well I mean I don't think that you can put the IDI up until it has been filed, which I know often takes a long time and maybe we need to take a look at that separate issue, how long those take. But I think again your initial report from the consumer that an injury happened, this is what happened, the product is going to be up there. So as CPSC gets additional data that can affect that report, fill in the blanks, I think it should be uploaded to the system.
So what you are suggesting is why we have the incident out there and while we are doing the investigation, well we don't make the incident investigation public until it is completed. So while the investigation is ongoing that data is protected from the public?
I don't know about protected. You could do for instance let's say the consumer files the report, but they don't have the model number, they just know the brand, but your investigator immediately finds the model number and the specific information, there is no reason why that information can't be added to the report to make it a fuller report even before they finish investigating the details, so you eliminate all the other products that brand makes as being the cause of concern.
I think from a manufacturer standpoint, I agree with what Nancy is saying. I think the IDIs should not be available to the public until they are completed obviously, I am not even sure how you could do that on a running basis. I think once the investigation is completed, it could be a link to an incident report that gave rise to the initial report, certainly. I think from a manufacturing standpoint, manufacturers will look at the database as a supplement to what we receive as well. Obviously most manufacturers have methods of receiving phone calls and customer complaints obviously in probably a greater volume then the CPSC sees on specific products. So I think manufacturers are looking at this as an incident database primarily, certainly other parties will look at this as a research tool or other things, which is fine. We are all for that as well, but from our standpoint, we are looking at this as probably a more rapid way of supplementing what we are seeing, because manufacturers are obviously looking for patterns or trends that might give rise to a reporting requirement. So it is likewise a valuable tool for manufacturers, but again taking all the secondary types of information, we are really looking at this as an incident database so we can look and see what else may be happening that we are not seeing through our own customer service reports for example.
Let me ask you about that database. Can you tell us a little bit more about that database, how do you update that database? It sounds like pretty similar to what we are trying to do here, except obviously it is just for your products.
Well I think all manufacturers do that, obviously most manufacturers have customer service departments and have a method of receiving information that just like the CPSC may hit a certain trigger level. Obviously consumer reports of non-safety related incidents or customer dissatisfaction or you know problems with assembly that isn't something that our department in claims or in safety is looking at as much as we are potential hazards in products and trends that maybe we are seeing through the raw data that comes in, which really kind of segues into the other issue. When we are talking about raw data, raw data often is just that. It is data that does need to be analyzed and does require some additional information so that you can make some sense out of it. We are, very quickly, investigate any incident reports that may give rise to a safety issue and you get a mixed bag of accurate reports from consumers. So it is a process that I think the CPSC will find also has to be done, once a report is received, additional information has to be obtained from the consumer, perhaps a follow up and all that information I think has to find its way onto the database.
So one thing that we have touched on already, we have an incident, we do investigation, there may be other memos, forms that come up as a result of that researching or investigating that incident. So we are kicking around this concept of a case that allows us to track, to tie everything together to that one incident or multiple incidents, but that risk. Any suggestions on how to form that case, how to tie things together?
Well we have talked about that perhaps again, I don't know the logistics and how the nuts and bolts of the database, what it will look like. But I think that there can be almost like a running log of you know the complaint comes in or the incident report comes in and within five days, the manufacturer has an opportunity to comment on that. So in the instance where perhaps the manufacturer has the contact information of the consumer, maybe the manufacturer had an opportunity to contact the consumer, verify the information or in some cases maybe even get the product back for inspection or analysis. Those comments could be posted, but I think in a chronological way, there could be additional findings, additional comments on the actual database and in chronological order. That is one way we kind of envision this happening.
Connie?
I apologize for going back just a bit. The issue that Wayne you mentioned about false alarms. I think that is mitigated in large part with a simple explanation on the database that indicates that an open investigation is not indicative, it is not a verdict of any sort. I think it is informative to consumers certainly and I think it helps quite frankly the commission's public sense of the commission of the fact that they are working on something. It may be closed and another key of sorts can indicate that down the line, but I think the more information the consumer has the better. And the point Brad that you mentioned about the information going up, I apologize if I am getting your point wrong, but the consumer's contact information by statute cannot go up on the public database.
We understand that, but we would encourage consumers, I hope that CPSC encourages consumers to make that contact information available to the manufacturer, which under the current system, it often is. We can reach out then to the consumer, ask them if they still have the product, ask them if we can interview them and perhaps get some additional information and again I agree with you that getting the information up quickly is fine, as long as consumers understand that certain instances are still under investigation. But the ability of a manufacturer to comment on their findings, I think will also provide inside an objectivity [inaudible] to put a little more flesh on somebody's report, then you would have if you just stopped with the incident report. Obviously, the statute recognizes the value of the comments by the manufacturer.
Nancy?
I was just going to add and I think eluded to it that there can be, before you can put up that finished IDI, there can be some line item on that database that says whether an investigation is open, ongoing, just like you now put on the bottom of your press releases for recalls, anyone with additional information, I think that should be an open investigation. And I think CPSC could encourage consumers to give the information for the manufacturer, my bet is that most consumers are coming to you, because they have already reported it to the manufacturer, so they should already have that information. But I would not want to see maybe this is for a different workshop, an issue whereby any means the manufacturer can convince the consumer to withdraw their complaint that they have put in there. So it is kind of like, if you do the service evaluations, you go some place and they tell you if you say anything less than five, I will get in big trouble. So any pressure on the consumer, oh well if we have solved your problem, would you consider withdrawing the complaint, we would obviously be opposed to that.
Let me step in for just a second. It looks like we have a bunch of comments. I would like to just sort of encourage everyone to focus this back a little bit on the data analysis piece and think about some of the issues around specifically if we could do some kind of an export of data, how could that be analyzed. Another big question I hear sort of underlying almost all of the comments is around data integrity, I think we need to come to that at some point. I don't want to jump in the middle, I know there is a lot of good discussion going on, but I just want to open that up as well. Sean?
In echoing some of the comments here about concerns about what goes in and data will be available, I think one of the benefits of having open investigation information available, in our experience again, using Nitsa as a baseline is that when consumers are aware that there is an open investigation, there is more of an interest in reporting. The, you know right now NITSA gets an average on the high end about 50000 consumer complaints annually. When you look at motor vehicles as the second largest purchase for consumers, that's a very small number. And that's, that's also covering motor vehicles, tires and equipment including child restraints. So the total number of people that are willing to actually report to the government I think is fairly low. And I think by encouraging and having information out there that yes indeed an agency may be investigating something, what tends to happen with that in our experience is that we see consumers more willing to come forward and talk about it and say maybe they weren't willing to do before. And the reality is the database is only going to serve all of us best when it's populated well and consumers know to go to that. And there's a lot of ways of doing that. But I would argue that you know having open IDIs and open investigative information serves many missions of all of us here.
Rich?
Logistically thinking, just some of the things I've heard questions about, getting information to manufacturers, manufacturers going out to assist the consumers, when I think of this as one whose been the analyst who wanted to get that data, what I could see happening is the manufacturer goes out to that individual, resolves that case on an individual basis and I never see the product. Or my investigator never sees the product. And I would have a, I personally if I were in that position would have a real concern that data was going to disappear if the manufacturer was in contact with the consumer about the complaint that it made to us before I got in touch with them or before my investigator got to go out and take pictures of it and examine it.
Again, this may be off on a tangent, but we do this pretty frequently and I think in many instances, the commission doesn't reach out to the consumer and try to get products back. But I frankly in 5 years with Lasco never received a call from the commission asking them if we had the product and if they could come and take a look at it at our facility, which we would be more than happy to, well I've even suggested that from time to time, that maybe there could be a joint effort on certain investigations because obviously the manufacturer is in the best position often times to explain the design and the operation of the product whereas the commission may be learning it from the ground up. So I think that that might give rise to some cooperative efforts between manufacturers and the commission as well.
Sal?
Well I think that given the fact about information is made available to the CDSC, we would encourage whenever possible the information is also made available to the public for two reasons. One is one of the reasons I think for the consumer complaint of public database is to enable the consumers to make that decisions, when to purchase or you know what items they have, how to manage the safety concerns. If there is sort of like a status box to indicate which are the complaints by the consumers, which, what is the status? Is the investigation conducted on the incident or is there any manufacturer feedback? I think that kind of information will help the consumer to have a more holistic perspective. And then for the second reason I think in the document it also said one of the organization goals is to provide the public with new and innovative ways to allow product incidents and notice of recalls. So the public would interpret that to include but not limited to consumers but also the industry, the researchers, the regulatory authorities. And for people to really understand and learn from those incidents, once of the key issue is to understand the magnum of incidents, to see how exactly the incident happened and whether the product is solely involved or is the product the root cause of the incident. And unfortunately such level of details is often times not available in the, in a lot of incident data. So as one of the example I want to just for example quote from some of the narratives of the NICE. If we look at a finger implementation cases involving strollers. So typical case you can read from NICE is amputation of finger, caught in stroller. So exactly how it happened, where is the [inaudible] had an IDI or INDP cases, you can see sometimes it happened when the caregiver is adjusting the back rest, other times it can be the caregiver was erecting the stroller or blocking the stroller or moving stroller between uneven ground, etcetera. So that can help you to form more immediate pictures to see exactly how such incidents happen. And then you can draw to see from the product design or manufacturing perspective how to further prevent such incidents.
If I had to end your point there, kind of what you're getting at and I think what's an interesting discussion topic for this particular panel is if there was a way that the agency could provide that third party data, or provide data to third parties, of all sorts, would there be a benefit in terms of third parties being able to do additional epidemiological research on that data to determine root causes where you know the agency doesn't necessary have at this point the resources to do that in some cases or whatnot. Is that, is that kind of what I'm hearing you say Shel?
Yes, that's correct.
Ok. Could I get maybe a reaction from either side of the room here on that thought? In terms of if and this is something that has been brought up in conversations, if we could do that, A what sort of groups might be interested in that data, what sort of research could they potentially do on that data? Much like with the NICE data where that's available publicly, third parties if they so choose can pull that data down, can do, can slice and dice that however they like. Produce their own hopefully meaningful results. If there was an output from the public database similarly what sort of the third parties might be interested in that data? What might they do with it, etcetera, etcetera. So any, any thoughts, any reactions to that from either side? George?
Just one quick one. And it's actually comes up to your first question that you listed up here, but since you're headed that way, I figured I'd jump in with it. Everything that I've read and heard about the database that we're talking about says it's primarily incident data and a lot of other stuff. So I think it's a mistake to talk about doing scientific, statistical analysis on those data because it ain't statistical and there's no way you're going to be able to do statistical analysis on those data. You might some detailed analysis of the product or of the issues and then look for some statistical stuff somewhere else. But it's not going to be a statistical database and you can't do that kind of analysis with it.
Don?
I would tend to agree to some, to some point with George, but you know what we've seen for example with the complaint data is that statisticians have in fact come up with statistical methodologies using complaint data. And rather than doing simple counts what they're doing is comparing complaints rates against the total population of complaints. And I would encourage and what I've submitted to the agency is a paper that was peer reviewed in injury prevention by Randy and Alice Whitfield covering surveillance for injuries associated with potential motor vehicle safety defects. It was April 2004. And they, they describe a methodology that is in fact very valuable and has proven out to be very valuable for identifying trends in the motor vehicle complaint data which is not a statistical set of data as you say. And is really isn't, but there are techniques that you can use to help identify those trends.
Ray?
I think we're going to continue to debate this when, I think it's interesting to listen to this. I think that we have to go back to the law. We have to go back to what the purpose of this is. If we're going to ask statistical analysts if they want to have this data available so that they can analyze it, I think that the answer is going to be yes. And certainly there's no doubt that this data is going to be cut many different ways and there's going to be all kinds of analysis done on it. But as George said, we have to remember that at the end of the day, this is a public incident database with consumers having the opportunity to actually tell us what has happened when they've used the product. And then for someone to actually go through and then search that situation and find out what kind of information can we tell from it. How was the product being used? What was the methodology that the consumer engaged in with this particular product? Had the product been repaired before? Had it not? There's going to be a lot of follow up questions before we get back to this. At the end of the day though, this as George said is not statistical basis of information. This is going to be incidents. And I think that while it may be useful to look at, while it may be very fun for statistical analysts to play with this data, at the end of the day the benefit of this is going to be as Nancy has pointed out and as [inaudible] has pointed us for the consumers, to have this information available to them, to know whether a product is under investigation, does it have something going on, does it have an incident that has occurred with it so that they can begin to think as they purchase the product or as they use the product, how am I going to react to this product? How am I going to work with this product? How am I going to protect myself? So I think that we have to be very cautious not to get too caught up. I think it's more important how we get the data and how accurate we get the data rather than how we analyze the data.
George?
One other thought I want to add. This may wind up in the parking lot for later. But the, one thing that I've always thought would help in analyzing incident data because I always wound up having to go find it out myself would be if we knew for example, we put out a press release about this product on such and such a date. Or we saw a newspaper article appear on AP and every other newspaper about this product on such and such a date, such that when the consumer goes into the database and says oh, they had only an incident here and then they had 25 of them all of the sudden. I wonder what was wrong, that there might be a notation in the database as well that says, you know there was this newspaper article about it and after people read it, they started complaining. Because those are the kinds of things that, I mean aside from the anecdotal nature, but the kinds of things that play most heavily on the nonstatistical nature of the data. The fact that a newspaper report blows up the number of complaints you get over night.
Right. And I think so we've got that one captured Pat? So I think that's an interesting point and I think we definitely should have some conversation about that. We'll put that in the parking lot for the time being. Omy?
Going back to the question of third party use of the data on the database, I myself am not a statistician, but I can speak to what Consumers Union has done with the NITSA database. In a recent example, just last month or in the previous months, our statisticians in our statistical department who have that background went into the NITSA database and looked at the reports of sudden acceleration in Toyotas. But they specifically, George to your point, went and looked at reports made prior to the news reports in August of last year because obviously you know that's going to have an impact, as they've told me on the kind of reporting that you get. But they looked at reports prior to that and looked at whether sometimes individuals reported it as a braking problem because that's what they perceived it to be. Sometimes it was reported as a sudden intended acceleration problem. And they used that information and did analyze it and those numbers did go up in a posting that we did on Consumer Reports Online.
Ok, Phillip?
When [inaudible] called my office for information about our complaints, they're largely looking for two things. Is it a business that they need to be wary of and what can be done about it? And so translate that to this floor, I think when a consumer is going to be [inaudible] data, they're going to want to know is this going to be a product that should away and if they're encountering a problem, what can be done about it? And I think those are going to be the core concerns that consumers are going to have. And so if you can find a way to correlate data in a user friendly way so that a consumer can access this data and with relatively little fuss, understand whether or not this crib posed this type of a problem or this backpack was shown to have lead paint in it, and then provide them with some sort of ready access or link to information that says exactly what can be done about it. I think you're going to be serving the primary purposes at least from the consumer's perspective, for reviewing this data. And so I recognize the need to qualify data and perhaps provide other information that's below the surface. But we began this discussion in some regard talking about how to present this data in a way that's going to be user friendly and consumer friendly for the folks for whom this data is designed to be useful to. And so I would just caution against at least on the surface providing information overload to a consumer who's primary concern really is, is this product safe and if it's not, what can I do about it?
Nancy.
Yeah, I was going to add to that I think the other thing that consumers use and currently is not [inaudible] as you said have a problem with the product, to figure out is this some freak event? Did I do something wrong? Currently we use you know when I get those calls from consumers is we go on online retailers and look in their customer reviews. And almost always, if someone calls me with a problem they've had with a crib, if I go on those online reviews, I'm going to see other customers with the same thing and yet often times if that person calls the company, they're told they're the first complaint that they've heard about this. So I think it's going to serve a great purpose for consumers just to have that information out there so they understand that it is in fact a dangerous product. Don't try and fix it. It's not you, it's not how you're using it but in fact there have been other issues with it.
If I can just add one more thing, it's, I think it's extraordinarily important if the information is available to tell the consumer what can be done. And so if there has been a recall or if there is a repair kit or if there is an instruction on what can be done to make the product safer, or what they can do to return the product, that's information that should be readily and immediately available to the consumer.
Follow up down there James.
Just a comment. I think I had it noted in one of the other later sessions, but I think now that you've mentioned it Phil, I think it's very important that if the situation, I'm thinking here in particular in electrical product area. And they feel that the product is at harm or at fault with a situation and resulted in harm, that there needs to be some feedback to the consumer also immediately that they should stop using the product. We do find a number of consumers who do continue to do that kind of situation, to continue to use the products. And I think that we need to have mechanism to give back to them right away with that situation. And also to, to preserve the product to some extend so that further investigation can be done. Whether it's by CPSC or by other people or whether it's by the manufacturers, but that they should know that the issue is being taken seriously. And that they also need to be very cautious about further use with the product. So if there can be some way to feed that information back, I think it'd be very helpful to overall safety.
Ben you had a comment?
I actually had two questions. I had a question for Nancy but Wayne brought up a point that I want to ask Wayne. So in an instance where a consumer had a problem or a risk with an appliance, first instinct would be to take it back to the store and return it and get a you know a better one, a new one. In that case, how would you go about convincing the customer or the consumer that you've got a 2000 dollar refrigerator here that you need to return that you want to return, but hey you got to keep it for, for us to do our investigation?
Well I wasn't suggesting it that way. I was suggesting in terms of a known harm type of situation and somebody is calling them back to get further information. I think that we have a duty to encourage them to be cautious about that. If the consumer is willing to take other action such as contact the retailer and do that situation, then I don't see a problem with that and that's the consumer right to pursue whatever avenue they have. Most of the retailers that I'm familiar with have a mechanism to automatically capture safety data as soon as it comes in, as soon as there is any return that involves or speaks to safety. Many of the retailers have mechanisms set aside so that the product is then preserved for further investigation whether it's by that retailer's safety organization or by the manufacturer. So there's mechanisms already in place in that situation. And I think that those are the ones that are going to carry on and I don't know that we want to interrupt that, get in the way of that. I'm more concerned with the fact that the consumer doesn't think that if they've been injured and it sounds to say the CPSC investigator who's following up with an IDI, that they would, that they would, that their problem is either unique or is it the problem is of such a nature that they should continue to use the product. And particularly with electrical products, I believe that's dangerous that they should take some caution. Thanks.
Actually Ming, before you follow up, I want to make sure that we've captured an interesting point in here. And I think we should park it for the manufacturer response discussion. Which is this idea of appropriate, immediate response on the part of the consumer. Is there a way through that manufacturer response press, we can incorporate some of that into that response? I think that's an interesting question I'd like to make sure we just park that for the manufacturer response.
Right and that's actually also for the parking lot I think Wayne brought up a point of working with retailer. You know the retailer has the mechanism to track incidents or you know preserve the evidence, we want to think about is there a way that we can utilize that information and somehow interact with that?
Right.
So back to Nancy's point. Nancy I have a staff question in front of me. So you were talking about a commercial site where people can provide comments on a product. So for in the, for the incident database, what's your opinion about allowing other people, other consumers to comment on an incident?
I think you would have to have, they would have to file additional incident reports. They would have to file their own incident report. I mean otherwise you're going to have the support, I mean I don't think that's what the database and then you also then would deal with the county issue. Because if they're all comments on one incident rather than their own separate incident, you're going to under count how many incidents there were. So I think that, you know, they, it might trigger someone to say oh I saw this and now I'm going to file my own. The other thing that actually what you were just talking about brought up that there also needs to be a way for a larger input of information. So if you do get retailers to agree to put their safety information that they have into the database, they're not going to agree I don't think to sit individually, file each one through your form. So there needs to be some way that you know if you have a data sheet or many incidents, that there's a way to incorporate that into the database as well.
Well and that, that sort of brings up an interesting question which is, is there, is there room for some kind of standard here around an incident so that in theory, if the agency could get that kind of information from a retailer or even from a manufacturer, is there a standard way that the agency could pull that in and incorporate that into the database? Just a thought. Any response to that? Shawn?
Yeah, before I respond, I also just want to comment on Wayne and I think Wayne's comment is well taken because one of the things we do here a lot [inaudible] from consumers who report to NITSA for example is well I reported to NITSA, I spent all this time filling out the form, got all the information and then I never heard anything back. I don't know what to do. And so some kind of response mechanism I think even at a base level that provides some particularly these like an electrical product for example. That be aware that you may not want to be using that product that is I think a very valid suggestion, something we really want to think about. In terms of you know your question incorporating the, the data back, in beginning you know using a standard format. If we look to the NITSA data and you can incorporate, it's a standard, you know asking if you want to basically looking at nonproprietary system so that we work with the data in a multitude of everything from you know statistical programs to Microsoft programs to any different ways you can, you can bring the data in, move it around in different places. And having a, you know just a simple text delimited files, most of us here who are involved in data can export, if we're using proprietary system we can export or import using a nonstandardized system. I think it's really critical to making that data flow back and forth whether it's from the manufacturers or from the agency back. I mean either way, it's got to be nonstandard. I mean it's got to be standard but nonproprietary standardized text type thing.
[Inaudible] you mentioned the retailer reporting situation, I believe CPSC already has a linkage with a number of retailers and are gathering information. And when those rise to the level, they then are followed up accordingly. I don't read in the statute under the collection of data that the retail information is included in Congress's comments. So I don't think that that's an appropriate source of information. I believe it lists exactly which are the entities to be gathered from and I think that the more that we stick with that, the more that we stick with the accurate information and information that is going to be useful to the database. If we get caught up in consumers who may have warranty issues or may have other quality issues in that type of situation, the more we're diluting the database. And not really encouraging the usefulness.
So George.
Small observation. And it's general. I'll probably say it in each one of the workshops that I come to. One thing I think we have to be very careful about is that we not hang too many bells and whistles on what we're trying to do. The more equipment you hang on the troop, the less capable he is when he goes into combat. That's why light troops are so effective. We keep hanging things onto it, you know oh we ought to do this, we ought to have this, let's add this in, we're going to wind up with something that's a nightmare for CPSC to maintain and not really of much use to the people, who mostly just want to go in and see how many complaints are there on Brand X widgets and all the other stuff might just make it harder for them to get their data.
Steve?
Yeah, just a follow up on that and I've sort of been listening to the conversation. The question that I've been having is to what extent are we trying to create a new animal that's going to be opportunity for consumers to you know provide complaints, to provide incident reports, you know for the manufacturers to receive that information. So if it's either, and I think Wayne your point itself, if it need to be sort of an immediate reaction to it. You know stop, don't do this so they can get back to the consumer. Or geez, this warrants further investigation, whatever that might be. But we're also talking, I think in this last question here about the information which is already publicly available and there seems to be for me another question which is how can that information which is already publicly available be made better searchable? I myself find that the current recall information on the CPSC, as good as it is, that could be better searchable. We have our own Excel spreadsheet that we pull the data from and we have to manually reenter it, because it's not in a way that you could sort of easily download it for the kinds of products that we're looking for. So I would, I would always savor, see I think there's really two questions here, they come together. One is creating this new mechanism for information to be reported so that consumers can use it, so that we can populate it with really good information. And the second one, and again maybe they link up, maybe not, I don't know, is taking the existing public information and seeing our friends from Maryland here, I'm wondering whether it's the state information too that might be out there that's publicly available and figuring out how to figure out, how to get that information all together in a publicly searchable framework. Again, this is information that's publicly already out there.
Yeah, Phillip.
On one level, your mission is just to try and maintain some level of statistical integrity concerning the complaints you're receiving with respect to a product, which is why I understand industry is concerned about incorporating reports that may or may not have been Congressional, Congress's intent that it be included. I don't think you have to completely abandon that information. I think you can maintain the statistical integrity of the complaints you're receiving against a product, but there's no reason why you can't link other information to that complaint data. And I'll offer as an example what the Better Business Bureau does. I mean the Better Business Bureau will provide information concerning the complaints that it gets against particular debt settlement company, but it will also link to that report how it's graded that industry, whether or not enforcement has been taken. I'm not overly familiar with your processes, but you recently did a nation wide recall of certain types of blinds, I forget the name. There's no reason why if somebody is searching a product concerning that particular type of blind that you only have to tell them that this particular product has X number of complaints. There are all types of valuable information that this agency can link to that including maybe a hyper, hyperlink to a recall, whether or not there are specific concerns that the agency has with this type of crib, with the bar that raises up or down. And so on and so forth. It doesn't have to be sophisticated and I'm not suggesting that you grade products the way the BBB grades businesses. But if you get a significant report from a manufacturer that shows a great [inaudible] receiving, that is not consistent with the numbers that you have from that product, you can decide for yourself how to address that information. And if not incorporating it into your statistics, at least you can incorporate some other link to some other information. And I don't want to weigh the solider down so to speak, but to a large degree, this information is already being gathered and maintained. And then, you know with Steve's comments, I don't know of a state agency in Maryland that keeps consumer product you know defect complaints. We, in my office, may have complaint categories, we make an attempt to categorize businesses both by practice codes and industry codes. But to the extent that any state action, you know for example Illinois has a very active practice in its attorney general's office with regard to product safety and there's no reason why that couldn't be linked. I know that the Better Business Bureau in Maryland links to our press and to our action [inaudible].
Ok, thanks for that point. I just want to let everyone know we're running up against the first break here. If we can wrap up this conversation, we'll open it up to audience questions at that point and then we'll break for 15 minutes, following that. So if anyone has a follow up to that point. Yep, Shel.
Well I just want to add two more comments. I think following to George and Steve's comments. And somewhat and the first thing is in my eyes what are the potential benefits and the limitations of the online incident reporting system? So if we're looking at it as example basically it's a voluntary sample. What it means is the sample is made up of people who self select themselves into the sample. It's not a probability sample. With that being said I think we can still generate sample statistics, however caution is to be taken whenever making any statistical inference or probability statement. And then the second thing is I think CPSC has many tools available in its toolbox when you're looking at incident data. You have nice IDI, NMDP, DTHS and a recall incident. So what additional tributes we can hopefully expect from this new system is, on one side it will serve as, hopefully serve as an early detection system. So for example, when you look at it a nice, nice online. Very easy to use. However, the most updated data is 2008, which is still very impressive, but there is one year lagging behind. And then so hopefully the online incident reporting head can really reporting on some emerging hazards. So serve as the proactive prevention role. And then second is the [inaudible], which I captured previously. Thank you.
Yeah, if I could just follow up on that comment. I think that when we're looking at trying to protect consumers, we're looking at that in a couple different ways here. One is we certainly want to put the information out there, that other consumers have published through this database, so that individual consumers can draw their own conclusions about you know, whether or not they wanted to purchase a product or whether a particular product is safe. But then also, with regard to the early warning comments, obviously the CPSC has their early warning system. Most manufacturers have something similar and you know, comments were made before that this data is going to be integrated with manufacturers data and I think that's absolutely true. And I think really what we're looking at here from a manufacturers perspective, is not necessarily new information. We're already getting a lot of this information from the CPSC, through the clearinghouse and other means and what we're looking at here is a way to get it faster so that the early warning systems that we have in place can respond quicker. And therefore you know, as was mentioned earlier, we have information that the CPSC may not have from complaints that came directly to us and we want to marry that information with the information that we receive, so that we can do our analysis. Now again, obviously we recognize it's not a statistical database, but nonetheless, we offer trends and you know and things like that, to try to fair it out. What are the true issues from what is just kind of a background noise so to speak, from the usage of consumer products.
So with that comment, unless anyone? Wayne.
Wayne: Just a couple quick things. One, I think that John brought up an interesting point and that is that at some point in time, somebody from the commission is probably going to have to make some decisions. They're going to have possibly even multiple reports about the same incident, coming in from different ways. How do they go about sifting through so that there isn't multiple incident reporting of the same incident? And I think that's not going to be such an easy thing. Because the consumer may report a model number in one place, the incident coming into the manufacturers or through the retailer or other mechanisms, maybe have a different, slightly different model [inaudible] model name. And to try and marry these up is not going to be exactly easy. Consumers move. They have [inaudible] addresses. They may report a phone number to one and a different phone number to another. This is, this is going to be complicated and I think the more than you can design into the database some simple drop down box situation, so that the consumer has to basically answer the same way each time, it will be very helpful I think to you all. The other is that I think that it's important that we realized that this is a living entity and it will change on a daily if not even hourly basis. And so it's important that if a consumer draws down information, they're drawing it down at a particular date and time. If they're going to print out the database for instance, I don't know whether that's in your thinking or not, but if it is, that they're going to print it at a [inaudible] intrient time. And so there may have, in products in which there's an ongoing investigation, if they print it one day it's going to show one thing, if they print it another, it's another. So I think that it might be helpful if this has a print function to it that the print the date and time that the consumer was actually printing this out automatically. So that the consumer will know. Because if they go back and then they compare the two and they see that oh, this incident now carries with it a flag that it's been investigated and it's been resolved and there's really no hazard or that kind of situation. Or that maybe a recall has now occurred because of that situation. They'll have that link directly. I think that linkage as pointed out, Phil mentioned and several different linkages and I think they're all exceedingly right and very valuable. But we also have to be very cautious about that. You know, if you link for instance to Window Blinds and you link to a recall notice, we don't want to give the consumer the idea that that particular model may have been recalled, when in fact it wasn't. And so we have to be very careful about making sure that if we're linking to this situation, we're linking accurately to it. And I think that could be valuable to link, but I think if somebody is going to be sitting back somewhere building and making that decision and it's not going to be such an easy thing to do. So the working with the data, the decision making that takes place, is going to be really complicated and I, I don't want to add to that, but I certainly want to add my respect to the people that are going to end up working through this situation on an hourly or daily basis. Thank you.
Shawn, if you have one final comment before the break.
Shawn: Let me just kind of wrap up. I think what it comes down to is what is actually going to constitute a complaint. What is it when people are putting in the information, and you know, I think Wayne's right on point in terms of duplicate issues. There's all these great things you can do with [inaudible] and so forth and getting to George's point that simplicity here. Let's get a definition of what is a minimum level, what is a complaint and who can report that complaint. And I think the successful database will be simple, it'll have an open architecture for the narrative you know, have the absolute minimal level of information that's necessary to get information that is retrievable and useful for the end users. That being the agency for it's own surveillance, for manufacturers for their surveillance, for any other group that's doing its' analysis. Whether it's consumer, looking at what it means. So that means looking at you know, if a consumer doesn't have the product name and the full information, the ID information, can we still get that complaint in a minimal way, does it fit into a category, so we can at least have a category of types of products. But it comes back to this, what really is a complaint and I think that's really what you know, has to be decided before we can go off into loading on all these other pieces.
OK. If we can keep it quick George and then we'll, we'll break.
George: Very quick. They do that. They do that right now, with their incident data files. They're you know, I've worked with those files for a few years and yeah, occasionally it gets to the analyst and you wind up realizing you've got more than one report in the pile, but usually it's been caught and flagged and cross referenced. So there's, there's infrastructure in place that's already doing that, at least that duplicate elimination process. Some might slip through, because you've got people doing it, but reality is, it's already there. It's not like we have to invent something from whole cloth.
OK. Well, so I think these last couple points have been really interesting around the idea of data integrity, potential data duplication. I think that's an interesting conversation. I'd like to pick that up after the break. It's 10:30 now. We'll take a short 15 minute break here. I think we're going to, because we're up against the break time, we're going to think on our feet a little bit here, work on the fly. We're going to reserve the audience participation questions for the end of the panel and we'll make sure that we leave sufficient time before the finish for that, for any audience questions. So thanks again for everyone. We'll take a 15 minute break here.
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So, I think we you know, for the first hour, I think we had a good dialog back and forth. I was happy to see people just jump in with their points of view. What we'd like to start out this second session with here is some questions and some points of clarification directly from CPSC staff, for the panelists. So I'll turn it over to the CPSC staff. Before I do that, I want to remind the folks who are watching on the web cast, that if you have any questions you'd like us to answer here, email them to workshopquestions@cpsc., we've got those coming in and we can read those out for you. We will have an opportunity to get to those shortly. So with that I'd like to turn it over to the CPSC staff for some clarification questions.
I guess I'll go first. A couple questions. One is, I think goes back to reporting. This may be actually a parking lot question, but reporting, reporting an incident. I know we have manufacturers, we have labelers, so how do we ensure that a manufacturer is properly identified? Is there a way, is there a look up list, is there a way to tell, is there some tool or [inaudible] know of that'll tell us this model, are these labels, are these products are made by this manufacturer or are you know, these are labeled by this labeler, but it's actually a manufactured by somebody else. Is there such a tool out there that we can, we can utilize?
I can only speak to our company and most of our products do bear our, our name. In the instance where we may put a private label or something like that on a product, even on the box or on the product somewhere else, you will see the name of our company. But again, I can only speak, talk, I know other companies manufacture wide variety of brands for other labelers so.
OK, so there's no industry wide database. It's pretty much the individual manufacturer keeps track of their own products and private labels.
Again, from our standpoint, we keep track of ours. I'm not aware of any databases that.
Don, you want to jump in?
Don: Yeah, I was going to echo the same comments. I'm not aware of any. I know you know, we manufacturer under own brands and sometimes under others and then sometimes it's the opposite way as well. There are people who are manufacturing under our brands, who have licensed our brands. So I think ultimately, somehow there's going to have to be some form of a registration process where you know, the various brand manufacturers can register to have things you know, information sent to them, reports from the CPSC. But there's obviously, I think there's going to be instances where stuff goes to the wrong people and there's just going to have to be a dialog you know, to sort that out and a mechanism in place to ferret that out. One suggestion that I might have is you know, in the world today, the lines between you know, retailers and manufacturers are becoming more and more blurred, particularly as you talk about private labelers and things like that. I think one of the data fields that needs to be included and I don't know if it's your intention to have it included or not, is where it was purchased. You know, and the reason I say that is, it may be possible or something for you to consider where you would notify the retailer you know, where something was purchased of a particular incident as well. Because that may be effective in getting the information, getting the report to the correct party, just as fast as notifying the actual brand on the product itself.
Let's, Steve, I see you want to make a comment and then Wayne.
Steve: I was just going to say, for [inaudible] in footwear, they're all very readily identified by brands. In fact, clothing there's a federal requirement. There has to be either the and what's called an RN number to the name of the manufacturer or the brand, is in the label itself. So if you've got a garment you can pretty easily tell the term of art as a responsible party. But to the point that was just made before, the question might be is that you know, are you looking at the retailer, are you looking at the wholesaler [inaudible] and they might be licensed that year. I mean, some licenses can go back and forth between different companies. So one year you know, company X might have the license to make a particular brand, another year another company might have the license to make a particular brand. So one of the things you really I think might want to look at is, is how you can and on a regularly updateable basis, identify those individuals at the companies who have responsibility for certain brands, for example, that can respond to those reports. Because that's, that's information that you're going to want to have as updated as frequently as possible so that, because you're going to have five days turnaround and then ten days before you report something. So you're going to really need quick response in people. And if there's an actual incident that requires you know, a much quicker corrective action like the kind that Wayne was talking about, and maybe only learn that by interacting with the manufacture. You know, that speed is going to be really important there.
Wayne.
Wayne: Ming, I think the simple answer to your question is, no. Is there a database out there that has all the information about who makes what and the answer is not in [inaudible] industry. We try in our database, to have a section on there to help consumers with, we call it, who makes what, to relate brand name to [inaudible]. But it's extremely variable and it as Steve said, you have to keep up with it almost on a weekly or monthly basis as licenses and brands and so forth go. I think that we've inserted in this situation and told our manufacturers, that they need to be prepared now, to alert SPSC to who the responsible party is that the commission needs to notify. So we've, we believe it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to let you all know, who do I, who does the commission send that information to. And that would included then brand names and types of products in that situation for which they are then responsible. In the case of retailers or retailer brand names, then the proper contact would be through the retailer and we certainly have the ability to get in touch with the manufacturer as the case may be. I think that it's not going to be an easy thing and there's going to be a lot of trial and error involved There's probably going to be some double checking on Steve's point about, no I'm sorry, John's point about putting on there where the product was purchased, might be a way to help that situation. Without getting the database too cluttered. But it's going to be difficult. There are, there are model names and brand names and product, generic terms. You I think that the database has to be very specific for what you're asking for. If you're asking for what is a model name, do you mean the general configuration, toaster or specific brand identity or a perhaps a model line. You know, the deluxe brand or something like that line. Well that's not really a brand, that's just the model series within that manufacturer. So I think the description on the website and I was wondering on this situation, if in the drop down boxes there could be a little peg off to the side, as there often are on other databases that you fill out. Sort of a here's a little help menu that you can then open up and the consumer can open up and say you know, what we meant by this is, you know this is meant to be the actual model name of the product or this is the meant to be the manufacturer's name. So be as specific as possible [inaudible] database with the consumer.
Which is, that's a great point. I definitely want to make sure we've got that captured. In the next workshop, we'll go through the actual incident report form in more detail. I definitely want to come back to that point in terms of how can we provide additional information to help consumers when they do enter in that information. Ming, does that address your question or do you have additional follow up on that?
Ming: Actually I'm just looking at sort of a mock up of some ideas that we were thinking about. You know, what type of information would we collect. But we can certainly save this for the next session.
Well no, that's, that's fine. If you've, if you've got, got something you want to go into now, I think that's fine.
Ming: Well this sort of does come into my next question is. Well two questions. One is what tools do you, do organizations use for searching? So we have this database out there. How would you like to use it? And from a consumer's perspective Nancy, I mean maybe you guys can speak to that. How do you think a consumer would like to search this database? Whether it's by you know, category like you know, toaster.
Right.
Ming: Like what Wayne was saying, or by model name. How would that look like?
I think it's going to be all those things. They're obviously going to search by the brand name, but if they're looking at cribs they're going to look for a way to look at all the reports you have on cribs. So they're going to want to look for the category. They may want to search by the defect. They have a crib that something failed on, so they want to look, just search for the term. Drop side. In any of your reports. And that would pull up all the reports. Something which may not apply, but mostly crib reports. So I think like any you know, database or searchable field, should be searchable by all the fields. There should be categories. General children's products, the brand names. They may search by model, so again, that'll be a field you know. If they have a specific crib that they're looking at and they know the model number because they're looking at it online, then they may, they may want to search that so.
George.
George: Just the voice of caution again. In terms of the things that we add on and the additional drop downs and all that sort of thing. I would say be very careful not to use the required fields. Because if there's anything that's going to lose you cases, it's when the consumer gets halfway down the thing and it says, you didn't complete form, go back and fill out model number you know, it's a. Because then they're going to log off. And so we need to be very careful that, we can ask them lots and lots of questions, but don't put them in the position that they can't submit their complaint [inaudible] don't have that answer.
That we certainly want to strike a balance you know, as [inaudible] was saying earlier is data usable and you know, provide the not required fields, but certain fields that can help us identify an incident. But we also do want to make it lightweight you know, so it's not, so it doesn't become a cumbersome process for consumers.
And I think there are so many tools available for databases that can be used. Like you mentioned the little question mark or button next to every field, that kind of gives you more information on it. An opportunity to see what you have written, to make sure you agree with it. The chance to go back and edit without having to retype it all. If you do leave something blank, maybe you don't want to reject it, but you do want to say, do you know the model number you know, here's how you could find it if you're interested. Or an option to just say I don't know it. But I think you know, particularly model numbers, is something I think people might be willing to give it, but have no idea where to look. So if there's a you know, here's places where it might be found if you want to look for it or something.
Let's Eileen [assumed spelling], did you have a comment? And then let's go Phillip and Shawn.
Eileen: I wanted to mention. I agree with what Wayne mentioned about having some sort of flag there that would help consumers understand what they're looking for and what they're being asked to fill out. I also agree with what George [inaudible] required fields concept being sometimes off putting and discouraging reporting. Given the wide jurisdiction that the CPSC has, to the types of products, a lot of consumers are comfortable and use everyday, things like Google and Bing and Yahoo searches. I think if you were to do just general categories of types of products, you know children's products for example, you know appliances, these are just the things coming to mind and then within those categories types of products to allow a Google type search, I think that might also be helpful to consumers and the lay person looking for information.
Phillip.
Phillip: I just wanted to make a couple quick points and then I'll echo what was just said. I think at least from my own personal experience, I think the FCC does a good job on it's website of creating a nice, user friendly, nice to look at, complaint database that starts very global when the consumer first gets on their site. It narrows them down to whichever area, whether it's you know, a child's product or some other category of product very quickly, so that the consumer isn't confronted [inaudible] data input requirements until they're getting to the neighborhood that they need to be in. The second thing and this is I guess just a cautionary tale, I think my state was one of the earliest to do electronic complaint data gathering. And as you can imagine and we're the consumer protection division. Consumer product if there's anything that's used for personal, family or household uses. So we get complaints about anything and everything. And we made a decision very early and I don't know whether you not you've reached that crossroad, but we define the complaint categories, not the consumer. I think you have to do that if you're going to have standard data. The second thing and a point was made earlier on that it needs to be a living database and I think that's absolutely true. We've had [inaudible] been with my agency for 13 years and we've had multiple debates over whether or not a new category needs to be added or one should be removed. I'll give you just an example. I think very early on in my career, we had a category for simply related to what we would categorize as a debt related complaint and that would encompass you know, debt collection, credit repair and then, and then debt payment assistance. We felt the need early on to then, as we were getting complaints during those different industries and we felt that there was a need to see well which industry is generating the most complaints to break it down along those lines. More recently the debt settlement industry has arisen and there's a subtle difference between debt management and debt settlement. So we keep breaking it down. Nevertheless, I think if a consumer is going to get and consumers don't self report and I should make that caveat Consumers don't self report on our site. They file a complaints and we have professionals within the office categorizing them for purposes of our database, so that we can maintain that level of integrity and uniformity. But a consumer may not understand the different between a debt management or a debt settlement complaint in my office and there may be those other subtle distinctions with how you want to categorize your complaints. And so all of these are, I made a comment during the break, I feel like I'm uniquely qualified to be here, because we've got 25 years of doing this and now we can figure out how to tell you how to do it correctly and we're getting pretty close. But you have to constantly be aware of those types of issues. Because ultimately, how you categorize the complaints, your data will only be gooder or as good or as bad as how well your categorize the complaints.
Shawn and then I see we've got a few comments on the site as well.
Shawn: We have some experience in building a data set, database that's commercially usable from [inaudible] data and one of the things we ran into was exactly what's been discussed here and that is the manufacturer, make and model, those kinds of problems which come up. And you know, it's a lot simpler in the motor vehicle realm in some degrees, because you know but it's still was complicated. For example with Land Rover. I mean, Land Rover was a multiple manufacturers, I mean, how do you categorize that over a time frame? So what we did is we built a road map of all of the manufacturers for motor vehicles and we can do that because it's a discreet set of brands and makes and models. We could not do that with tires for example. Because tires are frequently privately labeled. So you could have the same name on a tire and it could be manufactured by a multitude of manufacturers. The only way you would know which manufacturer it was by using the key number which would give you the factory code and so forth, which is I think very much of what's being discussed here is that these same issues are going to come up. So that, what we ended up doing was, we looked at OK, if you were going to look for complaints, you know, if you have the manufacturer, make, model, great. If you don't, if you have just model information you know, that's fine. Put the model information in and then things like, where did you purchase it or having even a category. Sort of for example, if you, in the product categories you have your categories and then you have sub categories. So children's products. So you could then drill down and decide you know, simply you could either choose a children's product or you could find the big categories within children's products. And then another way of getting around you know, if you don't have information, because unfortunately, as many of us know here, some of the products don't have labeling once they're out of the package. And so can you describe. So for example, if you don't have manufacturer, make, model information, you know it's a certain category, can you describe the product and provide some information for the consumer to describe the product. It's a you know, it's, it's a you know, round, black, whatever. I mean describe it in some terms and give some allowance for the consumer to describe that product. We may never know who manufactured that product, but you really don't want to lose someone who's coming to you to report that complaint. And now if at least it's categorized in a product category, it's not only something that's been submitted, but it's retrievable back and it allows you to look at that, whether you're a manufacturer or another consumer. Say oh yeah, I have one of those round, black things too, that's having this particular problem and this particular toy or whatever. But that's been our experience dealing with that and I think you know, simplifying the categories, we had to take a mix of categories and simplify them. Because for years there was really some historical problems. There wasn't really this thought towards you know, the future, so that a lot of the categories were overlapping, the were duplicative and we really re mapped a lot of them and spent a lot of time re mapping it and I think here you have an opportunity to come up some sixteen categories, but also realizing that it's a living database and it's going to have to change as technologies and products evolve and change as well.
Like to go to George and then Steve.
George: Much smaller analyst kind of question. But, do we have the option of saying to the person who's filling out the form, would you like to include, embed a digital photograph of your product? So that the person who's, everybody has got a digital camera now. If they're on the computer they've probably got their pictures on the computer. They could probably very easily embed a photograph of the picture. Now maybe somebody here could figure out the model and brand and so forth.
On the CPSC side, does anyone want to follow up on that point or?
I think that's one of the ideas that we're looking forward. How can we make this more user friendly, entering as much information as we can. But we're looking into that.
OK, Steve.
Steve: This is a question for Shawn. Do you, have you taken these new categories and gone back to NITS and said, update it this way. Because, because as I was thinking about this, I think you're going to have release 1 and then release 1.1 and 1.2 and then 2 and so on. And then you're going to find that the categories that you've come up with are going to be wrong at first and then hopefully it won't take you five years, but you'll be able to you know, quickly go back and change it and update as, as new product categories are even invented and come online and things like that. So I'm just wondering what your experience like that has been.
Shawn: Let me tell you, NITS is, has taken really in the last couple years, I think really last three to four years, has really worked at cleaning up the data you know. Our interest was really collecting all the historical data. So they didn't have an interest in going back and remapping that historical data, which we did. But currently they have cleaned up and reduced, but they've also changed the complaint form. The complaint form used to be you know, a good full thirty to forty minute process for a consumer and had a lot of problems that was you know, that would really dissuade consumers from using it. And I think they've done a decent job of cleaning it up and probably reducing the input down maybe to you know, about nine to ten minutes and even that's a lot. But you know, you're going to, this whole balance of collecting enough information and to make [inaudible] you know, putting off the consumer to get it in there. And you know, I think the idea of having it upload to a photograph, I certainly would encourage either upload of either documents or a photograph and/or a photograph. Because sometimes they may have a receipt. They may have additional information. Those are things that are really important and with NITS, they allow that kind of information as well. You can you know, you can put a repair order in for example on a car. So now you know what parts went in it under warranty, you know to get by the dealer or something like that. Those are the kinds of things that would make a difference in identifying it. But the open architecture for the complaint, the narrative, I think needs to be very, that's ultimately what we find a lot of the information and having an open architecture for that narrative and allow the consumer to start out be describing what happened, what was going on with the product and having that text searchable, is critical.
Caroline.
Caroline: Yes. In thinking like a consumer, what would you say the one thing, the most important thing the consumer would want to use this database for? To ascertain what kind of information? What would you say the most important thing the consumer would be trying to ascertain Is it? Because I know there's, there's been some discussion earlier about having in depth investigation reports available, having all sorts of information available. But what are some of the things, have you thought like a consumer, what would they be looking at this database for?
Yeah, Phillip.
Phillip: I think first of all, you're hitting an important point. Because there are going to be levels of users.
Caroline: Right.
Phillip: And so, as a law enforcement officer, there's never any limit to the information that I'd like to have from you. Because I'd rather have more information than less. From a consumer perspective, I think I'm just going to echo the comments I made before. Which is you know and maybe this is playing amateur psychologist to a degree, but when consumers complain to my agency or they, excuse me, when they come to my agency for data, they're trying to identify is this business a problem. So I'm looking for a home improvement contractor or I'm looking for somebody to do something for me or I'm buying something and I want to know whether or not this, this business has a good or a bad reputation. Translating that to your industry, I'm buying a crib. Has this crib, have their been complaints, would be I guess the first level. Because on the most you know, on the largest level, that's what the consumer is going to balance it against. Are there complaints? Then you can start to drill down what are the nature of the complaints? And then the second things, I believe, maybe a secondary purpose would be, I have this crib, it's a problem. I get on the consumer product safety commission database, what can be done about it? Is there a repair kit available to me? And can I, I've had this problem, can I get my money back or can I return it somewhere? You know again, you know, it's more my individual perspective, but I as a consumer, if I'm in the market to buy a product, I want to know is it safe or have there been problems. And if I have a product that's been a problem, I want to know what can I do with it.
What.
Caroline: Thank you.
What I'd like to do at this point, is actually turn it over for a few minutes to give the audience an opportunity to ask a few questions. If anyone has audience questions. I know we've also gotten a few questions via the web cast that we can, we can address at this point as well. Before we get to those though, is there anyone who would like to pose a question, either to CPSC staff or to any of our panelists? If you would, we have a microphone set up right there, we'll take a few minutes at this point to go through those questions. Then we'll hit a couple questions we've got via the web cast Then we'll continue with the panel. Yes sir? Please also identify yourself and the organization you're with, before you make your remarks.
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Of their particular product that they have a complaint or concern about. I find that useful in the recall situation in order to make the determination as to which product I should be looking for, before pulling something out of a daycare center or a retail store or my home. Second, I'd also like to note that right now, the CPSC, when you report and unsafe product on the actual web page, just above the yellow box, there's no way to upload a picture of the product. And I think that would be helpful. And I know that's not public right now, that information, but I think it would be useful for you all to see what the consumer has experienced in the marketplace as it relates to their particular product. And I think it would be quite a bit of useful information as to how a piece broke or something along that line so.
OK, thank you. So two points there it sounds like. One, really around sort of the future possibilities with the database. Second one, a well appreciated comment on the existing website, which we'll definitely capture. Anyone from the CPSC side want to, want to follow up on either of those comments or? If not, let's, let's move on. Does anyone else from the audience have a question or a comment? Yes sir.
I'm Steve McGonagal [assumed spelling], I'm a staff associate at Connametrica [assumed spelling]. And I've also worked for a long time with some of you, working with Ed Hyde and Hyde and Associates. And I'm actually one of the search tools for trying to figure out products and when you asked about what databases are available, I'll second the comments made by Wayne and others, that it's a very, very complicated process. One fire incident thing we did, we came up with 110,000 make and model combinations [inaudible] appliances. So it's going to be very, very difficult to have drop down boxes that are weildy. And before you get into make and model too much, you might want to think about products and defining what a product is. Because we've talked about a lot of products here where it's obvious that that's what the product is. A lot of what I do has to do with things that are not yet recognized as distinct products and they're difficult for consumers to distinct [inaudible]. So I guess I would second the comment, the product category, CPSC has fifteen categories and most of those work fairly well. They are things like lawn and garden or home workshop things. It's not always obvious which products belong in which categories, but in most cases it is. But once you go beyond that, it's very, very difficult to figure out if you have a small, electrical surface that heats your sandwich, whether it's an electric griddle or an electric or an indoor grill or a sandwich maker or a waffle maker with a converted surface and so forth. So even identifying what product it is in the first place, is going to be complicated. When you're doing the searches on make and model, you want to look for toaster make and model and product. Because they wind up in all three places. So someone, even if you very carefully structure product, make and model to be three separate fields, you'll get overlapping information in each one. You may get a serial number and the model number and if, if you, to use a non hypothetical situation, you're snowed in for a week and you create a database of dryer model numbers, you actually learn the serial number patterns that tell you the manufacturer. So but that's not something the consumers are going to be able to do. It's going to require at least from my experience, an enormous amount of time and familiarity with specific product categories to be able to make good judgments about which manufacturer it is and which model it is. Good luck.
Thank you. Yes please.
Leah: Hello, I'm Leah Wade [assumed spelling], with the Illinois Attorney Generals Office and I just want to quickly support the comments that people have made about being able to upload photographs. I spend a lot of time on the phone with consumers who are trying to identify products and having a photograph of the label would be incredibly helpful. But, in addition, I don't know if any of you all have tried to describe hazards on the phone to consumers. Trying to describe for instance, why the drop side cribs are so hazardous. It's so difficult to do and if a consumer could take a photograph of the defective hardware and send that in, that would eliminate having you know, paragraphs and paragraphs of having to describe what it is that's the problem. And just one more quick comment when you're talking about what kind of information to get from the consumer. Not only is it important to provide where they purchased it, when they purchased it is also critical too. Thank you.
Thank you. Any comments made?
Can I just ask a quick follow up question? When we talk about when, do we want to place a time, what's your opinion on the, how long a consumer can wait before they report it an incident?
I can, I don't think there should be any limit on reporting. Because I know from experience, that a twenty year old crib is still out there in use somewhere. So even if their incident was years ago, there's probably someone still out there using the same product. And so you would need to know. So I don't think we'd want any limitation on how long. I mean this isn't a legal matter. There's no recourse for them by reporting it. So there's no reason to have a limit. I don't think, on the time line. And I think that you know again, to go back to previous questions, some consumers are going to have [inaudible] answering those two questions, where and when, if it's an older product. So I want to, I think we want to make the verbiage, make it clear that we want their best guess. If they have the information that's great, if they don't it shouldn't stop the report.
If I can.
Echo everything Nancy said about.
Oh I'm sorry.
No, I'm sorry. Just one second. I echo everything Nancy said.
I want to add something to her thought too, in terms of time limits. It just, with a short personal anecdote When we were trying to write a regulation for rattles, I had someone who didn't think we ought to regulate them. Say well how come this is a problem all of a sudden? We never knew about it. And we found a case from a 1944 newspaper article and interviewed the mother in that case, who had never reported it to us, but it was a significant piece of the information that went into demonstrating that no, this wasn't a brand new problem, it wasn't something we just made up. It had been around for a long time. We just hadn't known about it. So if somebody sees something in the newspaper and says you know what, that happened to me ten years ago with that same brand, I'd want to know about it if I were still working there.
Yes sir, in the back.
Dave: Yes hi, I'm Dave Marsinerick [assumed spelling], from the US General Services Administration. [Inaudible] build and lease buildings for the federal government. We have about 350 million square feet of space that we rent out to federal tenants. I just want to kind of change this, change this a little bit, to focus a little bit from consumer, to have you consider businesses. Businesses use a lot of consumer products. You know, I'm sure that's obvious. But I mean, we use it as an employer you know, for our own people. I mean if things we put in our buildings rot, we're obligated to provide a safe and healthful work environment of course. And then we, GSA, like other real estate companies, also use some of these products as for lack of a better term, as a reseller. You know, we incorporate them into our building designs and fit outs. So we want to protect the people and we also want to protect our assets of course. So we want to keep these things out of our designs and we also want to keep them from creeping in. The latter is primarily where we see most of these devices and you can see all around him. You know, the serge strips and the monitors and things of that sort. So what I want to ask is that when you develop the texomoty for this, for this database if you would you know, not to make it more complicated. I'm looking at George there, but to try you know, when you do what you're going to do anyway, I know you're going to have descriptions, but if you could also perhaps considered intended use or intended application. That would make it easier I think, for businesses like ourselves, to categorize these things. You know, is it part of the building for example, building infrastructure? I have seen circuit breakers come through on recalls, things like that. Or would it be an office application? Would it be a fleet or auto? Would it be, would it be a children's product? Would it be something to do with cleaning or maintenance? Something along that line. I don't have the answer to it, but just, just to consider the application or the function, along with the, the actual description if you would.
That's, that's a good point. Does anyone on the CPSC side want to? Ming?
Actually ties in very nicely to a staff question. And Dan is it?
David.
David. You mentioned intended use. I understand that you know, a narrative is a great mechanism for consumers to report harm, but it's going to be incredibly difficult to search and do any sort of out [inaudible] without key words and things like that. So other than narrative and intended use is one lofty option for suggestions. You had what other information should we be capturing or what is the next most critical piece of information other than a text, free text narrative?
You want to respond to that?
Other than a narrative?
Any thoughts?
Yeah, I'd say just again, just some sort of hierarchy of uses. Now these things could be behind the scenes you know and change later I assume by the SCPC staff right? In other words if you know, you found out you weren't exactly on by the way you've categorized things, we could adjust that later. This doesn't have to be consumer burden right? I'm not sure if I answered your question. Just, but I did hear you talk about role, role use earlier and that's kind of what I'm talking about. So the people with specific applications would be able to look not only at the product but what's it's being used for. Not going to be able to you know, cut it all up 100%, but at least, at least I could cut out the things that I definitely know don't apply. So when we go out to the field, we could narrow it down with a list of things to look for so to speak.
No, I think that's a good suggestion. I think we've got that captured in our notes here as well. At this point sir, did you have a quick comment?
Keith: My name is Keith Corfield [assumed spelling], I work for a company called Fishman and Tobin [assumed spelling]. We make children's clothing. My question was regarding the database itself. If the only way for a consumer to access that data would be via the web. We have a lot of people that we sell to, they are low income people, they may or may not have access to a computer, they may not know how to use one, they may not know how to access a database. Is there any other way that they could find this information?
Turn that question over to the CPSC panel.
The statute does say that the information has to be searchable telephonically and paper. So the statute does address those issues.
Keith: It does?
Yes.
Keith: Thank you.
At this point, I believe we have a few comments that have come in via email from the web cast Mary, do you have those?
Mary: I do and I also want to follow up that last question. I just, our CIO just mentioned this to me. We are open to suggestions on how we can make this database searchable and accessible for those that don't have access to computers. So think about that. And we do have three questions that have been submitted. Two of them are from the same person. So I'm going to start with the question from Sara Gregory at Bed, Bath and Beyond. This is actually a two part question. The first question is, when CPSC receives a consumer incident report and the consumer identifies both the retailer and the brand of the product, does the CPSC send the incident report to both the retailer and the manufacturer of the brand for collection of information from both? If not, should CPSC do so? And before I turn that over to the panel, I want to suggest that we put that in the parking lot. Because we're actually going to be addressing manufacturer response issues in another [inaudible] tomorrow. So that's a you know, we're going to put that in the parking lot and then we'll bring it up again tomorrow at that workshop. The second part of that question is, do manufacturers present at the workshop believe that the information from retailers is accurate? And I think that goes back to retailers submitting incident reports. So does anyone on the panel have a comment to the second part of that question? The accuracy of information submitted by retailers.
Fred?
Fred: Typically we get notice, certainly a retailer that's on one of the voluntary reporting program, we get notices of those incidents and I can only say that the accuracy of the information they report to us is no better or worse than the information that they're given by the consumer. We do typically follow up on all of those reports and typically we do have the contact information for the consumer. But I think by and large it's pretty accurate, but again, it's not a function of the accuracy of the what the retailers are reporting to us, but a function of how accurate the information that they're getting is.
OK. Anyone else have a comment on that? If not, I know we've got a third email coming in, that we'll get to in a second. Mary, did you want to hit the third one as well or?
[ no speaking ]
Mary: Sorry. The next two questions are from Roger Hunt. He is with Timex Group USA. His first question is, how can we prevent a product or company from being tried and found guilty by rumor in the court of public opinion, before an incident can be investigated for validity or proven as a safety incident? Even the occurrence of a suggested [inaudible] be injurious to a company and damage their reputation before they can have the chance to exonerate themselves. There should be some reasonable time to allow a company to respond, before an incident is publicly posted, to allow for confirmation of validity of the claim, as well as determination of the actual safety of the product. Again, I'm going to request that we put that question in the parking lot and something that we're going to address at manufacturer and response workshop, tomorrow afternoon.
And was there [inaudible]?
Mary: Yeah, Mister Hunt has another question. Will manufacturers have the opportunity to contact an individual consumer regarding an incident claim? Would it be possible for the consumer to allow such contact when the enter a claim? The statute does address that and we will be speaking to that again, at tomorrow's workshop on manufacturer response.
OK. Thank you. What we'll do with the parking lot is in the beginning of that workshop, we'll revisit these parking lot issues that Pat's taking down, so we make sure we come back to those. At this point, what I'd like to do is we've got about fifteen minutes left on the panel. I'd like to go back to the original six questions that were published and just make sure that we've hit on all of those at this point. So let's go through those very briefly one at a time. First, should the CPSC design the online incident reporting form to ensure the capture of data that can be used in scientific, statistical, if so how? Second, what can CPSC do from a system design perspective to ensure the accuracy of submitted data? Third, what can CPSC do from a system design perspective to ensure the ongoing and perpetual integrity of submitted data? Fourth, in what formats should CPSC make data available to the public and why? Fifth, what types of data analysis and reports are being used by third party analysts in the public and industry? What are these tool's relative merits and drawbacks? And finally, what data sets, including information from reports of harm and mandatory and voluntary recall notices should be made available for public searching and reporting and why? I think we've briefly touched on most of those points. If I could, I'd suggest that one interesting area that has come up time and time again over and over in people's questions and comments, is this idea of data integrity. And how do we ensure the data is accurate, how do we ensure that to the extent possible, we've accurately captured the product, the manufacturer and so forth? I wanted to pose that question back to the group. I know there's been a few comments on it. Any thoughts, any reaction to that, any additional comments? Yeah, Phillip.
Phillip: I think you need to take a long look at what the purpose of the data is. Now as I look at section 6A, the title is Consumer Product Safety Information Database, but then it goes on to talk about consumer reporting. And so again, I'll use my office as experience. Our database is a database of consumer complaints. The purpose is to identify consumer complaints, what consumers are complaining about, so on and so forth. And so we don't alter the consumer complaint when it comes in. Because to do so then would compromise the purpose of the database. Because the purpose of the database is to show what the consumer thinks, not what the Consumer Protection Division thinks. If the purpose of this database [inaudible] Consumer Product Safety Commission to maintain data concerning safety information, then you can change, alter, compromise the data. But it depends on [inaudible] you believe the purpose of the data is. If the purpose of the data is to record what the consumer is complaining about, what the consumer is reporting, then you have to create some sort of a policy that will preserve that, that purpose.
All right, thank you. Yep, John and then Steve.
John: Just to add on to what Phil has said. You know, the statute also talks about inaccurate information and gives the CPSC the power to remove it or correct that type of information. And I think from a manufacturer's perspective, the most critical thing or I guess the two most critical things are, one that you are able to ascertain the person or person's identity, whoever making the report and keep that information. You know, obviously it's meant to be confidential. [Inaudible] that individual agrees to allow that information to be disclosed. But then second of all, to design your database and I think people have talked about it today earlier, so that it is a living document and that it's closed loop and that things can be updated and additional information can be added over time. And whether that information is developed by the CPSC or you know, through the comments and the findings of the manufacturer, is also contemplated under the law.
OK, Steve and then Wayne.
Steve: And I think the statute also includes and I'll just read it. There's a requirement that there's a verification by the person submitting the information that the information submitted is true and accurate to the best of the person's knowledge and that the person consents that such information being included in the database. And I think there's a way to capture that an that goes to a couple other points, including the one from the fellow from Timex, Timex as well. But it's really something that before they submit something, I think Nancy had a great point or maybe Amy, that before they actually hit the sort of the send button, they can actually review the information you know. Buy an airline ticket you know, is this in fact what I'm signing up to do or say. But then they need to maybe, maybe there's a box where they've got to essentially agree. You know, I agree to this and the default is not agree. So they actually have to go and deliberately click on it before they can move forward. That creates that sentence in there. So they can, so they can one you know, basically say, yes I agree that I am putting forward something that I believe is true and two, information so they can then be contacted back by the agency or if they consent by the manufacturer or however that's going to work out. So people can kind of get to the bottom of whatever the incident is. I think that's, that's absolutely critical that that information be captured in there, in that fashion.
OK, no that's a good piece of very specific feedback that we've got documented now. Wayne and then George.
Wayne: Yeah, I won't repeat what's been said because I agree with much of it, but I think it's important that also we understand that there's going to be a give and take to this information. And so there's going to be follow up in almost all of the cases that where a serious hazard or harm has occurred. I think that in those situations where it's this, whether it's CPSC following up or whether it's a manufacturer following up, the opportunity for that to take place is going to be very important. And that then means that there's got to be that initial contact that has got to occur. So that means that the database has got to capture enough information about that consumer, to allow them and encourage them to allow that secondary contact to take place. Now I recognize that the consumer's information is protected from being placed up on the database, but it should allow that secondary contact so that we can verify that information, so that we can get additional information particularly as you get into a narrative situation. Consumers are going to tell us all kinds of things about the product and the usage of the product and we're going to have to sift through to get to the most important part. I think that that's really yet to be done. The other is that I think it's going to be important that whatever that secondary contact is, whether it occurs days or a week or so later, has got to be linked in such a way. So that the original incident report has got to be linked in that [inaudible] so that the comments are directly applied, that it can either be in the same field or directly in that same field, so that it isn't found later. So that when somebody's searching this later on, that they see both the consumer's comment and the secondary follow up comment that comes in. So that everybody gets a clear picture of what's taking place in an honest picture of what's taking place with that particular product. I'll stop there. Thanks.
George and then Ami [assumed spelling].
George: Two observations. One of them I'm going to be the semanticist again and just point out that we can't ensure anything. All we can do is maximize the accuracy of the information. And I don't think we should promise that we're going to ensure it. Because we can't. There is going to be times, there is going to be stuff that's going to slip through. The other thing that I want to say now and I'll say it tomorrow and I'll say it when we answer the man from Timex's question is, when a consumer goes online to report to the federal government, in many cases you're already dealing with an individual who's thinking, oh my god, I'm giving my information to the federal government. Already perceiving himself as a small person who's going to basically turn himself in to the federal government as needing help. He's also very likely perceiving that he's dealing with a big company with a lot of big lawyers. In many cases more lawyers than the federal government has got. So I would want to make very sure that anything that we say on this forum or in checking the information, does nothing to intimidate the consumer. Because I've seen that. I've seen it on forums. I've seen things saying, you do know that perjury is a crime. We've got to stay away from that or we're not getting anything.
Ami: I would echo 100% what George just said. The goal, as Shawn deluded to earlier, the goal of this database and the utility of the database is going to come from it being populated and if you're intimidating consumers from reporting, you're absolutely intimidating them. I also agree with what Phil said. That the purpose of the database is what's important. The statute speaks very clearly to the fact that it's intended to be a consumer complaint database. And there's disclosure, excuse me, disclaimers that go up that indicate you know, none of this information is sanctioned or approved or what have you, by the CPSC. It's an individual consumer reporting their experience with a product. Which, the primary user that's going to be is for other consumers to search and for the commission to be able to see trends and see problems in the aggregate. And obviously get at product hazards before they become bigger problems. So to that end, there's been a lot of talk about manufacturers wanting the consumer's individual contact information. The statute's explicit that the consumer needs to give expressed, written consent to have their information turned over. I think it's critical that that be adhered to and that goes back to George's point about intimidation. The goal, if there's going to be investigation into this and contact of the consumer, the primary goal is for the CPSC to be doing that, not for the manufacturer to be knocking on the consumer's door and saying, you know, hey what happened. You're a federal agency, as you well know that's charged with protecting consumers from these hazards and I think consumers are eager to hear from you and are happy, are very glad in our experience when they do hear from you about this. So would just urge that that be kept in mind, despite the early calls for the consumer information to be turned over to the manufacturer.
Chelle [assumed spelling]: I think we have heard a lot of good discussions at the table this morning and ultimately one point of consideration is what Ming puts it, it's a balancing issue. You know, it's [inaudible] benefit and that is. And from my perspective there are two things. One is for the user to upload the information. If we can provide any very specific tips to what, in what regards the information is required. For example, product description. It can mean different things to different people when you look at that. So what do we mean by that? From our end, what we deem as very valuable, is look at the product characteristics, features, functions. So when you talk about a crib, maybe what matters more is if that drop side crib or not, versus what kind of patterns, colors, paint on crib, for instance. And then on the other side, is how to make the information searchable, useful, to the end user. And I want to just comment briefly on the free text input. There is obviously pro's and con's when you compare the pre-defined fields versus free text entry. So if you go with a pre-defined fields, it's less error prone. So people just click on that. You can word to you have the same thing entered in different ways, etcetera. But sometimes it can be a very arduous task, [inaudible] task, given to create that drop down list. And then for the free text, it sort of gives you the flexibility to allow the user to choose then select what input to put there. But then you know, hopefully with specific tips to guide the user to select most [inaudible] useful information that can help to [inaudible] questions. And the last comment is, I just want to share with you that for example, my company, [inaudible] knowledge portal, we should allow free text search, viewed upon the CPSC database and that can give you some information. Not only specific to the you know, products and then product characteristics, user behavior and when applicable, even caregiver behavior, when it comes to the children's products. And that turned out to be very powerful
OK thank you. Steve?
Steve: Yeah, I just wanted to make sure I mean you realize, I wasn't saying that they should always go in there, obviously the consumer needs to have consent if they want to have their information I mean I think there's a theme of even though this is a public database and it's supposed to be user friendly, there's a theme of privacy and confidentiality that's embedded throughout the statute for both I think the consumers, as well as for you know, the businesses and the manufacturers. And I think that's [inaudible] fine balancing act that you all are going to have to, have to deal with. I think that also again in the statute, just to point out. I don't know if people recall it, but I think you need to mention this point is that, there needs to be a very conspicuous statement that this is you know, not I can't remember the language here, but it's not, let me get to the very bottom here of this one. Shall provide clear and conspicuous notice, conspicuous notice to users of the database that the commission does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the contents of the database. So that's, that's a point, I don't know where that gets echoed or how often that gets echoed, but that's something, it's kind of like the little statement you put at the bottom of your power point presentations about the commission not having necessarily signed off on what you say. And I think that's an important point that you're going to you know, need to make sure you pull out a lot. The other thing too is and I noticed that in the report language I think in one of the earlier versions of the bill, there's a direction that you should explore other safety databases that are out there. Like the NITS database we've talked about. There's a lot of other databases that the federal government uses that provide really good, searchable frameworks. I can think of one that [inaudible] does on ruling requests called, Cross. And I want to encourage you to do that. It's just like Google. You type in any combination of words and you'll get lots of different, lots of different responses back and it's very text heavy. You're getting, you're getting [inaudible] back, basically so then you can review the letters and decide which letter or which opinion most accurately reflects what you're looking for. But that's another way to, without looking at an individual database field, but to be able to respond to a you know, a series of texts so you can compare apples and oranges. Because I think ultimately that's what you're going to end up doing. Even within certain product categories. You're going to have that apples and oranges situation.
OK, we've got about five minutes left. I want to get a few more comment in here. So Brad and then Nancy and then Shawn. It looks like you've got something you'd like to say. But as I said, we've got about five minutes left. So please, try and keep it a little bit brief at this point.
Brad: I agree with the comments that consumers should not be discouraged certainly, from entering the information on the database. I mean, I don't think we should threaten them with prison sentences if there's a word wrong in the text of their report. But from a manufacturer's standpoint, I think consumers should be encouraged to allow their contact information to be released to the manufacturer. I think that's one of the best check and balance system we have in this particular database, is to allow very quick action by the manufacturers. If in the situation where the identify a model number, they populate that field, it could be the wrong model, it could be the wrong [inaudible] other information that we need, date codes and things of that nature. It's very, very, very helpful as a manufacturer, to be able to capture that information so that we can use it and cross reference it and I think as John said, we can marry that with the information that we're receiving. Without the ability to do that, it's not a meaningful report for the manufacturer. Because we can't [inaudible] so to speak. So I think that's one thing we'd really like to see some encouragement and you know, and let the consumer knows that, let the consumer know that that information will not be used for any other purposes other than to follow up on the report.
OK, Nancy and then Shawn and then we'll have a few minutes for any final CPSC staff questions.
Nancy: Sure, I just want to talk to that same point. And then I think again, the purpose of letting the manufacturers see that report, is not necessarily to do a full investigation based on what that consumer reported to CPSC. My experience and I get a lot of calls from parents with faulty products, is that if they're calling, certainly if they're calling me, but if they're calling the CPSC, they have already tried to [inaudible] and you probably have their contact information. I think that the purpose should be to verify that it's the right model number as you said, that they're talking about a product that you in fact made, they have the manufacturer's name right and that any investigation of that complaint is the responsibility of CPSC. So I don't want to see it diverted to well, we give their information manufacturer will let them look at this. This is for CPSC to investigate. And so anything again that discourages the person from reporting it and giving full information I think is a problem. I think there are also, this is outside the database, but currently a person can choose to make a report that then isn't necessarily made public. And while we want all this information in the database, I think you still have to have that option. That if someone has had a child killed by a product, could be they don't want this in the public database. We obviously think it should be, but I think you still want to get that report, so there has to be some extreme [inaudible] I think for some people, that they are just telling you they don't want it in the public database. And I don't know how you do that, but I think for some cases, that might be important so that you get the data. Because otherwise they're not going to tell you. Especially if they think the manufacturer is going to come to their house.
OK. Final comment from Shawn and then we'll wrap up.
Shawn: Just going back to the accuracy issue and you know, this I think we've had, I've heard it hear several times, you don't want to be altering the consumer's input. It's really critical that what they are reporting is their experience of what they're reporting. You know, we've seen this conflict come up a number of times in where a manufacturer claims this is what the problem is versus what the consumer says what the problem is. Well the only person who has the first hand experience usually is the consumer with that and just keeping that you know, as a forefront. And you know, focusing back on what the whole you know, Section 6A, which is you know consistent with public interest in a manner that's easily used by consumers. I think we look at the design of the database, you want to look at things like, instead of having massive drop down lists of all kinds of things, maybe auto fills and simplifying the, simplifying and really reducing the amount of stuff that consumers have to actually put in. One of the things that we also find, it's really helpful is simply, when a reviewer from NITZA for example, takes a look at a complaint where say a child seat, the consumer doesn't always know what the model is but they've taken information off of that product and can put that model number in the complaint itself. In the narrative. Often a reviewer from NITZA would recognize it and they can put that into it, without altering the substance part and moving that into the appropriate field and still leaving that in there. So it's text searchable as well.
OK thank you. That, I think that wraps things up. I'm going to turn it back over to Mary.
Mary: Yeah. Actually I do want to go back. I have one clarifying statement to make and that goes back to the question about getting information in and back out to the general population [inaudible] populations, the statute does establish that the agency, CPSC, should accept electronic, telephonic and paper based means of submitting incident data, reports of harm. And we are researching and looking for ways to get that same information that's in the database back out to those populations that don't have access to computers, ready access to computers and we are open to suggestions and we are researching. So if you have some ideas let us know. But the statute does only provide or establish that we accept, provide means for accepting incident reporting electronically, telephonically and paper based. We are going to go ahead and break for lunch. And we'll start up the next workshop at 1 o'clock and that is, the next workshop is Reports of Harm, so we'll see everyone back here at 1 o'clock. Thank you.