Trip Database Blog

We have just finished manually updating Trip for this month.

Trip gets content via three main routes:

• Automated via mechanisms such as APIs and RSS. Once set up this requires no effort from Trip it just grabs new content on a daily or weekly basis.
• Semi-automated. A number of organisations supply us their new content via email (typically a .csv file) in the correctly formatted way. We then add this to the third way of updating content:
• Manual. Over a week, always in the middle of the month, Trip manually visits around 300 sites to manually find new content added since the previous month.

This month we just uploaded 650 records from the semi-automated and manual method – the majority via the manual way. Of these 86 were dated from 2020 or earlier and the rest were from this year. Of the older one these were typically from us having to updated outdated URLs or if we found new sources of evidence. The records from this year covered a large number of sources e.g. NICE, AHRQ, IQWiG, WHO, NIHR, ACOG, NCCMT, FDA, EMA, Prescrire, PHE, PHW, SBU (so many initials)!

In addition we manually tag all articles, from 2021, if they’re useful for primary care (automatically tagging articles for primary care isn’t great). Some examples include:

• Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Cardiovascular Disease: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association (American Heart Association)
• Acne vulgaris: management (NICE)
• Components, impacts and costs of dementia home support: a research programme including the DESCANT RCT (NIHR HTA)
• Proton pump inhibitors: avoid unjustified risks, and know how to “deprescribe” (Prescrire)
• Long-term use of sedative-hypnotic drugs in patients with primary chronic insomnia disorder (Swiss Federal Office of Public Health)
• Guidelines for the management of symptomatic sexually transmitted infections (WHO)

While it’s hard work it’s always great to see so much wonderful evidence being added to Trip.