TRIP on the iPhone (and other smart phones)

A few tweaks of the CSS on TRIP and it works rather well on the iPhone (and Android phones - thanks @amcunningham). See below for some screen shots. The top image is how the icon looks on the start page of the iPhone, below that is the top of the results page and right at the bottom is the bottom of the results page.


As well as looking great it makes TRIP usable on smartphones which is becoming an increasingly important 'market'.

NOTE: @amcunningham has commented that the pictures are potentially mis-leading. To be clear, what I've described is not an 'app' it's simply our site optimised for web-browsing. The top top image shows a bookmarked TRIP icon that takes you to the homepage.

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty and pretty useful!

A TRIP Down Database Lane: A Talk With Jon Brassey

I felt very privileged to be asked by Hope Leman for an interview. The results can be seen on her blog Significant Science and on AltSearchEngines.

One response I think could have been improved on was what aspect of TRIP am I most proud. I'm happy with what I said, but could have added to it. In the 10+ years of TRIP I estimate we've been searched around 50 million times. If only 1% of these had resulted in improved patient care for a single individual, that's half a million people - that is mind-blowing....

But, how does one measure the impact of TRIP? There are many possible reasons for seaching TRIP and many possible outcomes, here are a few:

A clinician with a clinical query, some potential outcomes:

• They may not find any suitable documents.
• They may find some documents and find insufficient evidence to help.
• They may find some documents that support their current care.
• They may find some documents that support a change in practice.

A student doing a study, some potential outcomes:

• Finds no articles, poor outcome.
• Finds useful articles that help in their studies.

An academic researcher undertaking a review or creating a guideline, some potential outcomes:

• Finds no articles, poor outcome.
• Finds articles that help improve the review or guideline.

As mentioned the list is not meant to be exhaustive! However, it should illustrate that people come to TRIP for many reasons and there are many potential outcomes.

A small bit of research we carried out in 2007 (click here to see the full post) showed the following:

• 13% - find the information they wanted all the time
• 53% - find the information they wanted most of the time
• 19% - finds the information about half the time
• 15% - find the information less than half the time

It was a small sample and invariably biased - so may not help much in deciding the impact of TRIP.

If anyone has any bright ideas, please share them!

Community noticeboard

Another new feature that was released in the latest upgrade was a community noticeboard. This allows for people to send targeted messages to TRIP users. It's free and easy to set-up. See the slideshow below (best viewed in full screen mode). We envisage it being used to highlight conferences, job and to even ask for help! However, we're keen to see how people utilise the feature, so feel free to be imaginative!

TRIP Database: Community Noticeboard

View more presentations from JonBrassey.

Can (or should) TRIP be social?

I posted the following comment on twitter:

Is 1,020 people on TRIP the beginning of a useful social network? If so, how to proceed. If not, how big before a crtical mass?


To give some context the 1,020 people refer to those people who have signed up to My-TRIP. I also think using the term social network was wrong, too many associations.

That aside, I had three responses:

@markhawker: Depends what "links" you want to be made? i.e. what connects the nodes?

@CharlieNeck: we shall be the fellowship of the trip

@amcunningham: I think 100 early adopters of new trip may be useful people to know. What are your plans?


My initial post was just me thinking aloud. We've got > 2,100 people signed up, all with country identification, all saying what their clinical interests are and also what their profession is. As I see these accounts being set-up (I get an e-mail of each one) I just see lots of connections e.g. country connections, professional connections, speciality connections.

Can these connections be put to good use? Currently, these connections do not formally exist. No-one has requested that TRIP make the connections.

My own view is that users of TRIP are looking for information. If they cannot find the information can they 'reach out' via connections to try and obtain this information. Someone with a cardiology question could make a request for information to people with an interest in cardiology. Someone needs a geographically specific question e.g. what's the best hospital for CABGs might ask cardiology interests in a particular country.

Is the above ambitious, not ambitious?

Might it be useful to offer:

• People 'like you' are currently looking at these articles
• People 'like you' who searched for asthma looked at these articles

I'm not convinced by the 'like you' notion or the usefulness of seeing what others are looking at.

I think this post demonstrates the very early stage of thinking on the matter. It might also highlight a lack of ambition. Either way, feel free to help give me a guiding hand!

Using CPD on TRIP

The CPD feature on TRIP is new, so we've created a simple walkthrough of how to use it (if the writing is too small, open in 'full' mode.

Using CPD on the TRIP Database

View more presentations from JonBrassey.

TRIP and Electronic Health Records (EHR)

A few months ago TRIP was approached by the manufacturers of a new EHR called Salutis Evidentia. They were keen to integrate their product with the evidence-base of TRIP. The natural way forward was to use our web-services and the results of this collaboration are close to being released. The image below shows you how the beta-version is looking.

What is happening is that when the doctor enters a diagnosis or treatment the system automatically searches TRIP and returns pertinent results. It's a simple concept which works well and looks great. We think it's a great feature and we're excited to see TRIP used in such a way.

If you want further details just let me know via the comments section or e-mail me directly (jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com)

Feedback on the site

So far the site has exceeded our expectations. We've had nearly 700 people register on the site in the first week and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

You may be pleased to know that we've got back to work with the next round to upgrades and tweaks to the site. Here's what we're planning:

• Overhaul of the TRIP Answers site. We've never really been satisfied with the performance of the site, so now's a good time to tackle that. It will also allow us to integrate enhanced CPD functionality.
• CPD is increasingly important. So, as well as better signposting of our reflective CPD offering we'll be releasing over 6,000 self-test CPD packs.
• Twitter feeds. We'll be working on a mechanism to link TRIP in with Twitter.
• Background knowledge area. We've had lots of positive feedback but a few comments about the look and feel. So, we'll be taking those points on board as well as increasing functionality and coverage.
• Introducing a search wizard.
• Semantic analysis. We're working hard to bring a semantic analysis function (a similar principle is used in PubMed's related articles feature). We plan to use this to help keep the TRIP Answers content up to date, experiment with free-text search and also to introduce a 'follow this' feature for each article. Basically, if you like an article you can follow it and any new, closely linked, articles are added to the site - we'll let you know.

Feel free to comment on the above and also make any requests!