The main purpose of Trip is to improve patient care.  Our approach to achieve this is to support health professionals to answer their clinical questions using the best available evidence. While we’re not perfect we’re pretty good (there’s always room for improvement).  Previous studies have shown that if we look at 1,000 searches of Trip this is how they may break down:

  • 1000 searches of which 79.1% are from users who manage patients or are patients themselves = 791 searches
  • Of these 791 searches, 72.9% relate to patient care = 576.6
  • Of these 576.6 searches, 70.7% help improve patient care = 407.7

So, around 40.8% of searches of Trip result in improved patient care (a whopping 70.7% of the times clinicians come to Trip to get answers to support their care, they get an answer).  While the figures should be taken highly sceptically (we’re written why they may overestimate and underestimate impact) they offer us a reasonable figure to base our impact measurement. Therefore, to approximate the impact of Trip we multiple the number of searches of Trip by 40.77%.

For January-March 2016 we were searched approximately 713,000 times.  Therefore, Trip positively impacted on care around 290,700 times.  The equates to around:

  • 97,000 per month
  • 22,360 per week
  • 3,194 per day

Those figures have got to be seen positively, but why be content with 3,194 per day, why not 50,000 per day?  With the forthcoming changes to Trip (improved search results, answer engine, better content management) this should surely be our goal.