One of Trip’s virtues is being easy to use. Behind this ease is a hugely complex website, one that took over two years to re-code. As well as re-coding the website there were other problems that affected the quality of the site and we’re addressing these in a systematic manner. As we tick these off the ‘to do’ list, the site get stronger. Some recent work includes:

Systematic reviews (SRs)

We automatically grab new SRs from PubMed (and we recently improved the filter for identifying new SRs). However, we also obtain SRs from other sources and we have finished automating this process. So, now, every week we grab a whole batch of new SRs. Previously the ‘other sources’ was a manual process and was not regularly undertaken.

Ongoing clinical trials

Another system that was previously semi-manual and not undertaken regularly, was the import of ongoing clinical trials from clinicaltrials.gov. This is now automated with new trials added weekly.

Broken links

The user interface – to alert us to a broken link – works well but the Trip process to fix these links was sub-optimal. We have now reworked that and it works really well. Less broken links = increased quality.

Our ‘to do’ list has been full of things like this – not major individual pieces of work but important aspects that might affect the performance of Trip. Each one ticked off means the less likely users are to have a poor experience – surely a good marker of quality.