Trip Database Blog

TRIP gets blogged.

Just came across this post. Mentions Ganfyd and includes a comment from Ganfyd’s Adam!

A bit early, as we’re only half-way through September, but I’m too excited! Anyway, the top ten articles viewed via TRIP are:

1. Stingray Envenomations (eMedicine)
2. Growth reference charts for use in the United Kingdom (Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health)
3. Buprenorphine transdermal patches (Norspan) for chronic severe pain (National Prescribing Service)
4. The Impact of Preoperative Hair Removal on Surgical Site Infection (Joanna Briggs Institute)
5. Management of patients with dementia (SIGN)
6. Common cold (GP Notebook)
7. Insect bites and stings (PRODIGY)
8. Urinary tract infection (lower) – women (PRODIGY)
9. Osteoporosis-treatment and prevention of fragility fractures (PRODIGY)
10. Nutrition support in adults (NICE)

Just a trial of some new software my web-people (Sequence) have developed, to make site creation easy. They asked me to try it out so I thought I’d have a go at creating some new mini-sites for TRIP. I’ve created six sites and added google ads – not sure what, if anything, will happen with these:

Diabetes
Cognitive behaviour therapy
Smoking cessation
Scabies
Acupuncture
Leukaemia

The software Sequence have developed was certainly easy to use. Even though I only created a batch of one page sites I’ve started more complicated multi-page sites and that seems equally straightforward.

Two particularly nice bits of feedback today:

1) The publicity about the free availability of the TRIP database is an opportunity for us to say how much we have valued the database as an essential tool for our enquiry work.

We have subscribed to it since it changed to a subscription basis but we are delighted that it has reverted to free access. This also makes it easier to publicise and promote to our enquirers.

2) Just a note to let you all know that I really appreciate the great work that you have done with TRIP Database. As a health professional, I have used TRIP to help a lot of patients…..Please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help TRIP remain such a great resource or to help TRIP continue to develop.

When Paul Glasziou evaluated the TRIP Database around 12 months ago he reported that of all the searches 50% resulted in a user following any of the links on the site. Another, pessimistic, way of looking at this is that 50% of users found nothing of interest. So, potentially, a poor result but one that reflects the lack of high quality evidence for all clinical scenarios.

However, an anlysis of the first 10 days of searching using the new interface has shown a dramatic improvement in ‘link outs’. It has now increased to 73%. One could almost say that the move to the new search algorithm has resulted in a 50% improvement in the search experience.

I like this site (click here).

I’ve wanted to introduce similar features to TRIP, such as comments, rank etc.

Yesterday I did a brief interview for the above publication. One obvious mistake is them mis-spelling my name – such is life. Still, nice they’ve taken notice. You can read the article here.

A few interesting links….

Drug Bank

Question-Answering for Biomedicine: Methods and State of the Art

Being Erlang Shen: Identifying Answerable Questions