Trip Database Blog

I felt very privileged to be asked by Hope Leman for an interview. The results can be seen on her blog Significant Science and on AltSearchEngines.

One response I think could have been improved on was what aspect of TRIP am I most proud. I’m happy with what I said, but could have added to it. In the 10+ years of TRIP I estimate we’ve been searched around 50 million times. If only 1% of these had resulted in improved patient care for a single individual, that’s half a million people – that is mind-blowing….

But, how does one measure the impact of TRIP? There are many possible reasons for seaching TRIP and many possible outcomes, here are a few:

A clinician with a clinical query, some potential outcomes:

• They may not find any suitable documents.
• They may find some documents and find insufficient evidence to help.
• They may find some documents that support their current care.
• They may find some documents that support a change in practice.

A student doing a study, some potential outcomes:

• Finds no articles, poor outcome.
• Finds useful articles that help in their studies.

An academic researcher undertaking a review or creating a guideline, some potential outcomes:

• Finds no articles, poor outcome.
• Finds articles that help improve the review or guideline.

As mentioned the list is not meant to be exhaustive! However, it should illustrate that people come to TRIP for many reasons and there are many potential outcomes.

A small bit of research we carried out in 2007 (click here to see the full post) showed the following:

• 13% – find the information they wanted all the time
• 53% – find the information they wanted most of the time
• 19% – finds the information about half the time
• 15% – find the information less than half the time

It was a small sample and invariably biased – so may not help much in deciding the impact of TRIP.

If anyone has any bright ideas, please share them!

Another new feature that was released in the latest upgrade was a community noticeboard. This allows for people to send targeted messages to TRIP users. It’s free and easy to set-up. See the slideshow below (best viewed in full screen mode). We envisage it being used to highlight conferences, job and to even ask for help! However, we’re keen to see how people utilise the feature, so feel free to be imaginative!

I posted the following comment on twitter:

Is 1,020 people on TRIP the beginning of a useful social network? If so, how to proceed. If not, how big before a crtical mass?

To give some context the 1,020 people refer to those people who have signed up to My-TRIP. I also think using the term social network was wrong, too many associations.

That aside, I had three responses:

@markhawker: Depends what “links” you want to be made? i.e. what connects the nodes?

@CharlieNeck: we shall be the fellowship of the trip

@amcunningham: I think 100 early adopters of new trip may be useful people to know. What are your plans?

My initial post was just me thinking aloud. We’ve got > 2,100 people signed up, all with country identification, all saying what their clinical interests are and also what their profession is. As I see these accounts being set-up (I get an e-mail of each one) I just see lots of connections e.g. country connections, professional connections, speciality connections.

Can these connections be put to good use? Currently, these connections do not formally exist. No-one has requested that TRIP make the connections.

My own view is that users of TRIP are looking for information. If they cannot find the information can they ‘reach out’ via connections to try and obtain this information. Someone with a cardiology question could make a request for information to people with an interest in cardiology. Someone needs a geographically specific question e.g. what’s the best hospital for CABGs might ask cardiology interests in a particular country.

Is the above ambitious, not ambitious?

Might it be useful to offer:

• People ‘like you’ are currently looking at these articles
• People ‘like you’ who searched for asthma looked at these articles

I’m not convinced by the ‘like you’ notion or the usefulness of seeing what others are looking at.

I think this post demonstrates the very early stage of thinking on the matter. It might also highlight a lack of ambition. Either way, feel free to help give me a guiding hand!

The CPD feature on TRIP is new, so we’ve created a simple walkthrough of how to use it (if the writing is too small, open in ‘full’ mode.

A few months ago TRIP was approached by the manufacturers of a new EHR called Salutis Evidentia. They were keen to integrate their product with the evidence-base of TRIP. The natural way forward was to use our web-services and the results of this collaboration are close to being released. The image below shows you how the beta-version is looking.

What is happening is that when the doctor enters a diagnosis or treatment the system automatically searches TRIP and returns pertinent results. It’s a simple concept which works well and looks great. We think it’s a great feature and we’re excited to see TRIP used in such a way.

If you want further details just let me know via the comments section or e-mail me directly (jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com)

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.