As we roll out the new changes to TRIP in a few months, one area we’re keen to explore is targeting clinicians in a given clinical speciality. We’ll be making a big deal about the My-TRIP feature and one aspect of this is allowing users to select which speciality they belong to.

Might it be helpful for a clinician to highlight articles they found useful and these can be seen by others in the same speciality? Technically, it’s relatively straightforward to introduce such a system, but is it worthwhile? Would the benefit extend to articles over a certain age?

For instance, a cardiologist might search for an article, look through 5 or 6 and decide that 1 or 2 are great articles. They could then hit a ‘noteworthy’ button against the 1 or 2 articles and this could then be flagged up to other cardiologists. If there are 100 cardiologists sending through recommendations one could create a league table of most recommended for other cardiologists to view.

I can see the benefits but I’m not sure of the downside (assuming people don’t take the recommendations too seriously).