Trip Database Blog

I saw this feature on the BBC news website and liked it, so I dug around and found out about Apture. In a way this is my trial. it allows you (the website controller) to highlight sections of text and it will pull through appropriate links to content, so some examples:

• Ligaments
• Liverpool FC
• Half Man Half Biscuit
• Olympic Games

Hopefully, if this works, various embedded link-outs will appears.

Fingers crossed.

We’re getting there with TRIPanswers and hope to have something by September, a slight delay, but that seems traditional. I’ve said very little about TRIP answers but will give a bit more detail here and over the next few weeks.

In a nutshell TRIPanswers is a repository of clinical Q&As.

We hope our efforts will see a long-term dream of mine realised – a space on the internet where clinicians/information specialists can freely share their Q&As with others. With that aim in mind we will launch with 8 Q&A services around the globe, all willing to share their Q&As.

At the foot of this post is a screenshot of the homepage (click on image to make it full size) and I’ll highlight a number of the key features:

• A list of most recently added Q&As.
• To the left of each Q&A is a multicoloured cube with the letters s, a & c underneath. This represents the quality score that each Q&A receives: s = search, a = appraisal and c = confidence.
• Tag cloud. Each question is tagged and these aggregate to form a tag cloud. This can work independently, to allow browsing of the repository. However, it can also work with the search, to easily narrow down to the users area of interest.
• Tag Cloud of Clinical Uncertainty. A personal favourite, this is a sub-section of the site, specifically for questions where the evidence is poor. This links in from my work with DUETs but is different in two main ways. Firstly, it does not restrict entries to therapies. Secondly, the entry point (uncertainty) is more pragmatic. But the aim is pretty much the same – highlight areas where the research evidence is poor.

Another key aim of the site is to encourage interaction and user participation. We have made it easy for users to leave comments on each Q&A and we believe this can only improve the quality of each Q&A.

In summary, I would say that TRIPanswers is a repository of Q&As which aims to interact with users to boost and improve the content still further.

An interesting article ‘Easy does it‘ posted on the Rough Type blog. The main thrust of the article is that as online access has actually narrowed access to core publications, thereby restricting attention to the high-status journals. The effect of this is to speed up consensus and narrow debate.

It also makes the amusing point that poor indexing can be helpful as it widens the chances of discovering new research!

TRIP released a load of optimisations at the start of last week (22/23rd July). This resulted in the speed going from slow to acceptable/good. Giving it a time frame it has gone from 10+ seconds per search to around 2-3 seconds.

Since the roll out of the speed increase our traffic has jumped again. Yesterday we were searched over 52,000 times. Looking at the last 3 days we were searched 129,938 times (includes a Sunday). Compare that to the same 3 days in mid June, we had 104,285 searches.

Entirely sensibly, people like speed in searching and have better things to do than wait!

David Rothman has highlighted a delightful slideshare presentation (click here). I think I’ve managed to embed it below!

I still think there is a great benefit to health being made more social via the internet, by that I mean sharing experience. How this experience interfaces with evidence is another story. One thing that is pretty clear is that evidence takes second/third place to personal experience and to the experience of people we trust.

Anyway, enjoy the presentation…

Hot on my post on MedPedia comes the long-awaited (!) release of Google’s wikipedia-competitor – Knol. You can read a review via this ReadWriteWeb article.

There seems a number of articles on health topics (aimed at consumers) and the author of the article is clearer shown (alongside their credentials) – addressing the main criticism of wikipedia; in that the authors are known. Users can suggest alterations – but the author needs to approve. A few exampl articles:

• Cancer genetics
• Cataracts
• Mitral Valve Disease

This will be interesting to watch to see if people prefer Knol or Wikipedia. A few years ago Google was perceived in a much more friendly light than it is now – so will users flock to suggest alterations and improve the articles? I think the possibility of payments (via google adsense) might just swing it…

An interesting new development:

“MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.”

Click here for further details

I’m very happy with progress on the slow speed of TRIP – we’re no longer slow! I appreciate slowness is relative, but we’ve gone from 10+ seconds for the search results to be shown to between 1-2 seconds. Before it took and age and now it seems quick.

The basic problem was the way the system handled the snippets (the small pieces of text below the document title). These were identified as the bottleneck and so they way the results are returned has been changed to take into account this slowness. Previously, the results and snippets were generated and displayed. Now the results are displayed and the snippets dropped in when they’re ready. There are other potential areas of optimisation but we can consider these at our leisure!

Apologies for the slowness of the system to date and enjoy the new speed.