Trip Database Blog

So far the site has exceeded our expectations. We’ve had nearly 700 people register on the site in the first week and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

You may be pleased to know that we’ve got back to work with the next round to upgrades and tweaks to the site. Here’s what we’re planning:

• Overhaul of the TRIP Answers site. We’ve never really been satisfied with the performance of the site, so now’s a good time to tackle that. It will also allow us to integrate enhanced CPD functionality.
• CPD is increasingly important. So, as well as better signposting of our reflective CPD offering we’ll be releasing over 6,000 self-test CPD packs.
• Twitter feeds. We’ll be working on a mechanism to link TRIP in with Twitter.
• Background knowledge area. We’ve had lots of positive feedback but a few comments about the look and feel. So, we’ll be taking those points on board as well as increasing functionality and coverage.
• Introducing a search wizard.
• Semantic analysis. We’re working hard to bring a semantic analysis function (a similar principle is used in PubMed’s related articles feature). We plan to use this to help keep the TRIP Answers content up to date, experiment with free-text search and also to introduce a ‘follow this’ feature for each article. Basically, if you like an article you can follow it and any new, closely linked, articles are added to the site – we’ll let you know.

Feel free to comment on the above and also make any requests!

About 6 weeks ago I posted Using crowdsourcing to identify content suitable for resource poor settings which generated some discussion. We found out on Friday that we had secured funding to get this project launched. It’s too early to say how long it’ll take but I don’t want to hang around on this important project.

Since the last post on the topic I’ve had a number of additional discussions around the topic and most of these revolve around placing this project within the context of other initiatives. I’ve spoken to a number of academics in the area as well as a great chat with HINARI.

If all things fall into place this could be the start of something rather wonderful.

The TRIP Database allows users to embed a TRIP search box into their own webpages via a small piece of HTML (click here for further details). In addition a Cardiff GP (@amcunningham to give her twitter ‘handle’) has created a widget to use in Netvibes (click here). I don’t use Netvibes but it’s great to see TRIP being made available on different platforms.

The new site is out there and performing wonderfully. Lots of praise needs to be directed towards Phil (our web developer) who has done 95% of the coding on the new site. Usage has already increased and the site is taking it in its stride, returning results quicker than the old site. We’ve had nearly 300 people register for the My-TRIP feature already.

The latest version of TRIP is out there and after 24 hours appears stable! So, what’s new:

• New content. We’ve merged the former specialist search engines with the main TRIP which means TRIP searches the old content plus a core collection of 300 of the top clinical journals. We’ve also introduced a new type of content ‘News’.
• Evidence slider. TRIP has always been keen to allow users to easily answer their questions using the best available evidence. The evidence slider allows user to easily select the level of evidence they require.
• New design. Using a separate design agency and extensive usability testing (thanks Minervation) we have radically overhauled the site, making it more user friendly and simply better looking! We’ve even got a new logo.
• Improved algorithm. The evidence slider has allowed us more freedom to enhance the algorithm, making the results even better than before.
• Advanced search. This has been completely overhauled and should now work and work well!
• Speed of search. We’ve dramatically improved the speed to TRIP by improving the way TRIP works and the extensive use of caching.
• Better guideline filtering. As suggested by a number of people we’ve increased the number of guideline categories (from 3 to 5) and improved the labelling of guidelines from the USA (previously they were simply down as National Guidelines Clearinghouse.
• CPD. Users will now be able to view articles in ‘CPD mode’ allowing them to easily record their reflecting on the article. This can then be stored in their ePortfolio (available via My-TRIP).
• Export of records. Another popular request is to allow users to select articles of interest and then export them either via e-mail or as a file. The new TRIP supports this.
• TRIP fails. Most search engines (medical or general) let their users down. Basically, a user can’t find what they’re after! To overecome this we’ve devised a number of solutions. Firstly, we’ve have provided a link to the American SumSearch with the same search carried out in TRIP reflected in the link to SumSearch. Secondly, the search on TRIP is sent to Google and the Google results are returned on the same results page as TRIP.
• doc2doc forum. We have teamed up with the BMJ’s community forum doc2doc to provide an outlet for unanswered questions. If you’re a health professional and can’t find what you’re after, use the forum and someone may well help!
• Background knowledge boxes (BKB). For our more common searches we’ve created BKBs which link out to core textbook-style content. This has been highlighted as useful as it can contextualise some of the research found in the main part of TRIP.
• Medical images. TRIP has had medical images for years, but they’ve been badly represented and they weren’t particularly prominent. We’ve enhanced our coverage (now over 100,000 medical images), enhanced their display and introduced a sample of results on the main results page. NOTE: The medical images are currently being edited to remove some erroneous images, this will take a few months.
• Community noticeboard. We’re excited by this as it allows our users to post notices of interest to other users. If you have a conference, job advert, volunteering opportunity, trial enrolment etc let other users of TRIP know (currently that’s around 35,000 visits per day). You can even target the adverts e.g. a conference on cholesterol could be targetted to those carrying out cardiology related searches. We’re not sure how this will develop, but we think it’ll be big!
• My-TRIP. Users signing up to My-TRIP will be able to use the CPD functionality, create auto-searches of TRIP and search history. In addition we’ll be giving a proportion of our advertising revenue from those signed-in to My-TRIP to Médecins Sans Frontières and HIFA2015.

There’s probably more – but that’s enough for one post!

I’ve just realised that it has been a while since I’ve updated you on the new site. Every day it’s not live adds to my frustration. The main reason is that we’re finding it frustratingly difficult to access our servers. It should be really straightforward but for us it’s not. Without proper access to our servers we’re finding it difficult to make the appropriate changes to the site. If things carry on like this we might have to look for alternate hosting arrangements – which isn’t what we particularly want to do – mainly as it will add significantly to our costs and timescale to get the new site out.

Right, this is what it happening. The site went live and started to develop problems. For some security reasons we were denied access to our own servers so couldn’t fix things. We then had to take the decision to roll-back to the ‘old’ version. We should have regained access to our server yesterday to fix things, but that was not possible (for all sorts of technical reasons). We’re hoping that this will now happen this morning.

Assuming that is the case we can start to investigate the causes (we have a fair idea already) and hopefully a rollout soon after.

It’ll be worth it.

Huge embarrassment for ourselves and we are very very sorry for the messing around.

Basically, the new site was up for around 6 hours and for – as yet – unknown reason was highly unstable. We’ve taken the decision to revert to the old version of the site while we fix it. We’re hoping this will take no more than 48 hours. Another knock-on of this is that we need to take the whole site down shortly (probably tomorrow) for around 2 hours!

For all those of you who registered on the new site, you’re registrations will be safe.

Once again we’re very sorry and very embarrassed!

Apologies, but the new site won’t actually go properly live till Monday! It’s ready, but we haven’t got time to test it.

However, if you’re interested, you can give the new site a whirl via this beta URL.