Trip started as a result of my work in running a responsive clinical question answering service for the National Health Service – many years ago.  I have had the pleasure of running a number of such services (alas, not one for a few years) and have kept these questions and answers within Trip.  Unfortunately, these have been neglected: they are often two years out of date and they look terrible:

Click here to see it on the web in all its glory!

This is a valuable resource, knowledge needs from real clinicians not the typical top-down approach to knowledge.  We’ve got well over 5,000 Q&As

As part of this years developments in Trip I’m keen to see if we can help save/update these Q&As.  So, how might we do this? Here are some thoughts:

  • Improve the design – obviously!  But as well as how it looks it might also be functional elements. Currently it’s the Q and then the A – with no structure.  Could we add things like ‘bottom line’?
  • Produce a priority list of Q&As to be updated.  This could be based on a number of elements e.g. (1) How popular is the Q&A (2) How old is it (3) We’re hoping to produce a system to find new, related, articles – so if we find some recent evidence that gets a higher weighting than those with none.
  • Open it up to the community – wiki-style – to edit and update. We’re going to be doing lots of work around the Trip community in the near future and this will lend itself nicely to a wiki-approach.

I’m really excited by this and if it works well we could, one day, allow users to pose questions and get the crowd to answer.

Thoughts?