TRIP is free-access, there are no charges to use it and we don’t want to restrict access.  We also want to develop TRIP, to make it more useful so more clinicians and patients can benefit from high quality evidence to support their practice/care.  We’re low cost, with myself (Jon Brassey) being the only (part-time) paid employee.  Aside from that we have server costs, insurance and technical support – it all works out at about £3,000 per month. We generate this money from a variety of sources and occasionally have ‘spare’ that we can use for improvements to the TRIP site or various experiments (e.g. TILT, Blitter and our developing world initiative). 

TRIP has had a massive global impact, helping in millions of episodes of care (estimated at over 20 million times). We want to have an even bigger impact, we have the ideas but we need help to achieve our aims. 

We have drawn up a list of improvements we’d like to see – based on our massive user survey last year (click here for the main results).  But the main improvements are:

  • Improve the transparency of TRIP, for instance what each of the categories mean, how the results are worked out etc.
  • Search refinement.  We’ve got lots of ideas to make it easier for users to refine their search including an auto-refine feature.
  • Increasing the number of 3rd party databases we link to while reducing the clutter on the results page. A challenge, but we’re confident we have a solution.
  • Introducing an experimental feature, launching the answer engine – a really exciting feature.
  • A design overhaul.  Making everything clearer and easier to use.
  • HTML5.  We’d love to redesign our site using HTML5 to make it work better on mobile devices and tablets.  A separate mobile optimised version would be wonderful.
  • Numerous minor things that just need fixing or tidying up.

These are ambitious changes and the answer engine has massive potential.  I estimate that these changes will cost somewhere between £15-25,000 ($24-40,000).

We know that TRIP is well used and we know people have a lot of affection/love for TRIP.  I’m simply asking users to give something back.  Please consider making a donation to support TRIP.  If you value TRIP and want to see it continue and to grow please don’t leave it to someone else to donate. If you decide not to donate can you please answer these two questions to better understand the reasons – click here.

Donate via this link.