In my previous post on our automated review system I concentrated on describing the product. This is all fine, but one quotation I’m trying to remember in my day-to-day life is:

So, why do what we’re doing?  The reasons are multiple and include:

  • Years ago I had a conversation with someone and I ended up sending them a link to a set of Trip search results.  They said that was fine, if he had a few hours to read them – which he didn’t.  I started to wonder if there was a way of automatically scanning the literature to allow people to really easily get a feel for a topic area.  So, you might want to see what interventions are useful for a given condition (perhaps the first line has failed).  Our system will automatically generate a list of interventions with an estimate of likely effectiveness.
  • The Trip Answer Engine is hugely popular and we can use the technology to boost the content.  So, it solves a problem for Trip (how to boost coverage) and it solves the problem of quick access to information for a specific clinical question.  So, a user might want to search for acne and lasers we can pull through an answer along the lines of “Lasers have been studied in 12 RCTs and have been broadly favourable” we can link to all the articles (if the user has the time) but we can also rank the intervention, saying something like “Lasers are ranked 3 out of 8 for interventions in acne“.  This seems incredibly useful to me.
  • Updating guidelines and reviews are problematic.  With our system you could ‘watch’ an intervention and get alerts when new evidence is generated.  Or, even more useful, when new research is published that contradicts the previous findings.
  • Rapid reviews are increasingly important and the automated system could form a core part of any semi-manual rapid review tool.
  • Intellectual challenge!

So, one product – multiple problems solved!