Clinicians waste a lot of time searching for clinical evidence! In AskTrip, we’ve seen that when our automated answers are limited, it’s often not because the evidence doesn’t exist, but because the question itself was too vague.

Evidence searching is like diagnosis: a fuzzy question leads to fuzzy answers. The fastest way to get to the right evidence is to sharpen the question before you even touch the search bar.

Structure the Question: The Foundation of Evidence Retrieval

A clear, well-framed question is possibly the single biggest factor in cutting search time.

A vague query like “asthma treatment” returns thousands of scattered results. Reframed using PICO, the question becomes much more precise: “In children with asthma (Patient), how effective are inhaled corticosteroids (Intervention) compared with leukotriene antagonists (Comparator) in reducing exacerbations (Outcome)?”

This is the PICO framework:

  • Patient (or Problem)
  • Intervention
  • Comparator
  • Outcome

You don’t need every element every time, but just adding a comparator or outcome can transform your results from broad noise to focused evidence.

And to make this even easier, Trip includes a dedicated PICO interface with four search boxes—one for each PICO element. This helps you break down your question into its core components and avoid the common pitfall of vague searching.

Using PICO in Trip

Once you’ve identified the PICO elements, you can:

  • Enter them directly into Trip’s standard search, combining terms to sharpen your results. For the example question the search might be children asthma AND inhaled corticosteroids AND leukotriene antagonists AND exacerbations which generates just 265 results of which 39 are from the higher quality, secondary evidence.
  • Or use Trip’s dedicated PICO interface, which has four search boxes, one for each PICO element. Unlike the standard search, this isn’t designed to be exhaustive. Instead, it aims to return a handful of the most relevant documents, the ones most likely to answer your question quickly.

Looking Ahead: Smarter AI Support

We’re enhancing Trip’s PICO interface with AI and large language model (LLM) tools, so clinicians can automatically uncover more relevant evidence without extra effort.

This is just the beginning. In future blogs, we’ll explore how to speed up other stages of evidence searching—using filters effectively, navigating the evidence pyramid, and more.