Epocrates

A very interesting video

De testimonio - 2008 Harveian Oration

I posted about this soon after he gave the talk. Now, via twitter, I've been alerted to the audio and slides for Professor Sir Michael Rawlins excellent talk on the nature of clinical evidence.

Strongly recommended - click here to view.

Medpedia

The relatively well-hyped Medpedia has been released as a beta. I saw the announcement via this TechCrunch article.

Too early to make comment, it'll take a few weeks to fully appreciate the site.

Despondex - humour

A great new drug has been approved by the FDA.

Survey results

The survey has been running for two weeks now and we've had a massive response, which we're very pleased about. The highlights are below:

How often do you use TRIP?

• This is my first time 17.9%
• Infrequently 7.1%
• On a monthly basis 14.3%
• On a weekly basis 25%
• On a daily basis 35.7%

How often do you find the information you're after?

You'll note in this graph (click to make larger) that we've got comparative data from 2007. It appears we've improved. In 2007 66% of users found the information most or all of the time, this has now risen to 80.7%. This is a vital measure for any search engine, so it's great to know we're supplying better results than ever.

Improvements

We listed 6 possible upgrades to TRIP, the top 3 were:

• Alert me when new research of interest to me is added to TRIP
• Add extra content to better answer my questions
• Include recent news items

All these will be acted on in our new upgrade

Web 2.0 tools

Around 60% of people taking the survey skipped this question - but the rest reported using the following.

• Blogs 73.9%
• Facebook 52.2%
• Twitter 21.7%
• Other 17.4%
  

Finally, we received a number of free-text comments:

• I think TRIP is a fantastic resource
• Excellent service -- thanks for providing it at no charge! Don't change the focus on the use of evidence-based answers, please
• I've been using TRIP for years and find it a wonderful resource
• Nothing to suggest thanks, it's an excellent and unparallelled resource
• congratulations and thanks you for spanish version
• great resource!

I do like the survey results, thanks for everyone who took part!

A fascinating post from Google on how we track data on search results:



See the full post for further information.

New format for BMJ research articles in print

I'm very excited by this piece of news 'New format for BMJ research articles in print' which is announcing two abridged versions of BMJ articles:

• PICO model. A 'classic' EBM method of structuring a clinical question (see this article on the CEBM site for further details) where P = patient, I = intervention, C = comparison and O = outcome.
• Short cuts. Articles written by the BMJ itself.

I think both methods have merit, PICO as it structures the paper into a clinical question and answer and Short cuts as the BMJ take an independent view of the paper. The rapid responses are worth a read.

Adam Boswoth talks

For those of you not familiar with the name, Adam Bosworth used to be Vice President of Product Management at Google heading up Google health. A couple of talks of his can be seen via this page. To link directly to the presentations, see below:

• Helping President Obama: How to Spend $50 Billion on Health IT - pdf or pptx.
• A Modest Proposal: New Products and Services to Fix Health Care - video or slides.

A brief selection of interesting posts...

...that have caught my eye:

• iPlato supports Southwark MMR drive, using text messages to improve MMR uptake!
• Dean Giustini has posted on the new Google Latitude service. I've tried it and it works well, slightly disturbed by the potential consequences!
• HRT cancer connection 'confirmed' a long-running controversy rears its head in the news.
• Rare diseases day is coming soon! I've long been intrigued by rare diseases and was delighted when the wonderful Orphanet appeared.
• Another long-running interest has been services that critique news stories. David Rothman ran a great blog article on (click here) and has just updated it (click here) after finding a new service that I too hadn't been aware of!

Happy reading

Find it fast

The Yale medical library have been very busy creating a batch of very professional video tutorials on various 'evidence' tools, the complete list (to date) is below:

• Introduction
• The Clinical Question
• The Pyramid of Resources
• The Cochrane Library
• Clinical Evidence
• ACP's PIER
• Critically Appraised Individual Articles
• Clinical Queries in MEDLINE
• The TRIP Database

We're very thrilled to see TRIP mentioned alongside such luminaries.

New records and updated URLs

Monday morning and two new batches of records added to TRIP:

RCOG - Due to URL changes I needed to re-index the whole lot (n=46)
Cochrane - In total 256 new (n=112) or updated records (n=144) systematic reviews

These will not be searchable until tomorrow.

NOTE: If you haven't undertaken our survey yet, can you do so PLEASE - click here.

Usage stats

It'a always nice for TRIP to look back and see how well we're doing, it helps remind us that we're doing something right. As you'll see (at the bottom of this post), since September our visits have increased by nearly 250% while our page views have increased by 330%.

Arguably the biggest change has been the massive speed increase we had in mid-October. As well as making people more likely to stay on the site and explore it also meant more people returned to the site.

How big will TRIP go? I'm staggered by how well it's doing at present and it far exceeds my expectations. However, I'm determined to push ahead with changes to improve TRIP and work will start in early April on our next significant upgrade. I'm keen to further improve the speed of TRIP and respond to users feedback which has been significant and 100% constructive (if you haven't already please take our 5 minute survey (click here).

January
954,825 Visits
2,445,659 Pageviews

December
745,085 Visits
1,960,785 Pageviews

November
751,890 Visits
2,101,726 Pageviews

October
453,539 Visits
1,042,808 Pageviews

September
387,539 Visits
740,697 Pageviews