Trip Database Blog

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.

It should be tomorrow (18th Sept) morning when the new site goes live. It took a little longer to transfer from the development server to the live server (where it is now). So, the stability testing will not finish until after the network people have gone home, but I’m hoping they’ll be in nice and early!

If you like the current TRIP, this should be the last few hours before it goes forever…..

Don’t worry, the new site is significantly better 🙂

We’re currently transferring over the new site to our ‘live’ servers. Once this has been completed and various checks made we can go live. It may be today or tomorrow morning (assuming nothing major happens).

If the site goes live tomorrow it’ll conincide with a meeting to discuss another significant round of upgrades to the site (for launch in November/December). Things really are moving fast and don’t look like slowing down in the slightest!

Ahead of tomorrow’s launch (fingers crossed) we’re revealing our new logo.

You’ll note that we’ve kept the pyramid motif but have modified it. The colours in the pyramid correspond with those in the ‘evidence slider‘ with the highest quality evidence represented by green, which is at the top of the pyramid. We’ve embraced colours in TRIP as it’s a quick and easy way to recognise the corresponding level of evidence of a particular result. You’ll also note that we’ve incorporated the trademark symbol (TM) into the logo (a legal requirement) as we have the trademark for TRIP.

After yesterday’s teaser of the ‘evidence slider’ today is another glimpse into the new TRIP.

S0, what does the above all mean? Basically, the above image is taken from the foot of the results page on TRIP and the key elements are:

• ‘Not found what you’re looking for?’ – it has always bothered me that TRIP doesn’t answer all the questions all the time, so what do you do then? We’ve teamed up with SumSearch in a reciprocal agreement that allows users to seamlessly search each others sites. You search on prostate cancer in TRIP and the link to SumSearch is dynamically generated to search SumSearch for prostate cancer. You’ll also see that we’re pulling through the top results from Google, which in user testing was seen very positively.
• Medical images. As mentioned previously on this blog we’ve significantly increased the number of medical images available to our system. In previous surveys users have indicated that they’re not aware we actual search medical images. To help combat that, we’re displaying medical images in the main results page.
• Community noticeboard. Do you have a message you want to share with others? This free service will allow targetted messages to be displayed to users of TRIP. Want to highlight a conference, job, recruit patients? Why not use this feature.

There’s so much more to show as well – this really is the largest ever set of enhancements to TRIP.