Trip Database Blog

…that have caught my eye:

• iPlato supports Southwark MMR drive, using text messages to improve MMR uptake!
• Dean Giustini has posted on the new Google Latitude service. I’ve tried it and it works well, slightly disturbed by the potential consequences!
• HRT cancer connection ‘confirmed’ a long-running controversy rears its head in the news.
• Rare diseases day is coming soon! I’ve long been intrigued by rare diseases and was delighted when the wonderful Orphanet appeared.
• Another long-running interest has been services that critique news stories. David Rothman ran a great blog article on (click here) and has just updated it (click here) after finding a new service that I too hadn’t been aware of!

Happy reading

The Yale medical library have been very busy creating a batch of very professional video tutorials on various ‘evidence’ tools, the complete list (to date) is below:

• Introduction
• The Clinical Question
• The Pyramid of Resources
• The Cochrane Library
• Clinical Evidence
• ACP’s PIER
• Critically Appraised Individual Articles
• Clinical Queries in MEDLINE
• The TRIP Database

We’re very thrilled to see TRIP mentioned alongside such luminaries.

Monday morning and two new batches of records added to TRIP:

RCOG – Due to URL changes I needed to re-index the whole lot (n=46)
Cochrane – In total 256 new (n=112) or updated records (n=144) systematic reviews

These will not be searchable until tomorrow.

NOTE: If you haven’t undertaken our survey yet, can you do so PLEASE – click here.

It’a always nice for TRIP to look back and see how well we’re doing, it helps remind us that we’re doing something right. As you’ll see (at the bottom of this post), since September our visits have increased by nearly 250% while our page views have increased by 330%.

Arguably the biggest change has been the massive speed increase we had in mid-October. As well as making people more likely to stay on the site and explore it also meant more people returned to the site.

How big will TRIP go? I’m staggered by how well it’s doing at present and it far exceeds my expectations. However, I’m determined to push ahead with changes to improve TRIP and work will start in early April on our next significant upgrade. I’m keen to further improve the speed of TRIP and respond to users feedback which has been significant and 100% constructive (if you haven’t already please take our 5 minute survey (click here).

January
954,825 Visits
2,445,659 Pageviews

December
745,085 Visits
1,960,785 Pageviews

November
751,890 Visits
2,101,726 Pageviews

October
453,539 Visits
1,042,808 Pageviews

September
387,539 Visits
740,697 Pageviews

medgadget, a site dedicated to emerging medical technologies has an annual Medical Weblog Awards and the winner for 2008 (announced recently) was KevinMD. Medgadget reports:

“The winner of the Best Medical Blog of 2008 is the legendary KevinMD. Dr Kevin Pho has built an exemplary blog that features timely news and opinion of the latest in medicine, bringing in one of the most devoted audiences and keeping thousands of curious minds satisfied with smart and funny writing.”

For those eagle-eyed amongst you, you will have already spotted a KevinMD badge on the homepage of TRIP. In return we’ll soon have a ‘search TRIP’ box on the KevinMD homepage.

Reciprocity can be very useful at times!

The health video site icyou has thousands videos, all related to healthcare. The site tells us:

“icyou is a user-generated video community that empowers you to make informed decisions about your health”

I was made aware of it via twitter and following this link will highlight the discussion – click here.

I’d welcome any other thoughts on icyou!

With our experience with Gwagle and the lessons learnt, I look on the explosion of clinical social networks with some interest and increasingly little expectations. A few interesting recent posts on the subject:

• Clarifying “Social (Network* OR Media)” – David Rothman
• Top web 2.0 services in medicine – Dean Giustini
• Another list of biomedical communities – Bertalan Meskó

I feel that many of these social network initiatives are technology led, not user led and are likely to suffer as a result. It’s easy to look on at the likes of Facebook and think – ‘we can do that’. The likes of Ning have made entry minimal but still there appears to be no obvious social networks for clinicians that have made significant impacts.

The reasons for this are no doubt complex, but a few thoughts are below:

• Many clinicians have developed social networks and real ones at that!
• Social networks typically need a critical mass to make them useful.
• Still too early on in the innovation ‘cycle’ to make it mainstream – this point could be said about many web 2.0 initiatives (e.g. blogs, social bookmarking etc)

For an overt social network to do well it needs to package itself differently and I have no idea how that might look. I think a better chance of success is to try and create a clinical social network at the back-end of other websites and help them power community aspects. I would also like to see some efforts at an opensocial initiative for clinical sites. If these very small sites could – loosely – band together it might just create a site big enough to have a critical mass.

I keep wondering if trust is a keypoint in all this?

Every now and then TRIP likes to find out more about our users and how they find TRIP, what improvements they’d like to see etc. Therefore, we’d really appreciate you taking 5 minutes to take our latest survey. We have two surveys, one for health professionals (and allied professions) and one for non-health professionals.

These surveys really are useful in improving TRIP so please contibute via these links below:

• I’m a health professional or information specialist
• I’m NOT a health professional

The following is a short selection of tweets that I enjoyed or found useful.

sciencebase @JoBrodie As you’ve found, there is no good evidence for glucosamine efficacy, even in conjunction with chondroitin.

joemd MD Life: For the clnician to become “patient centered” is often to become less self-centered

bengoldacre Randomised trial finds no evidence of mercury in vaccines causing brain nastiness: Where will the antivaxxers go.. http://tinyurl.com/bovqsx

bbchealth The UK’s doner kebabs contain “shocking” levels of salt, fat and calories, a survey concludes. http://tinyurl.com/b6t9yw

stephenfry More filming to be done. Hospital scenes. I can’t help liking myself in white coat and stethoscope. Is that sad and ridiculous?

bbchealth Reducing what you eat by nearly a third may improve memory, according to German researchers. http://tinyurl.com/alls8x

JRBtrip Anamnesis – when you tell your medical history to a doctor!

kevinmd Should pediatricians care about the manners of children? http://bit.ly/XzbV