Trip Database Blog

The above number is the number of extra searches in August compared to July. August is traditionally a slow month, which makes this new record number of searches, all the more remarkable. The actual number of searches for August was 1,369,638

I get so excited by these figures for two reasons:

1) They’re pretty big numbers
2) Think of all that good quality evidence that is being used!

Wow…

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1561578&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

For a number of years web 2.0 has been a buzzword. I’ve been caught up in the hype and explored it’s use in a variety of situations, with limited success.

It would appear I’m not alone. In the web 2.0 world that relates to health professionals there appears to be no clear ‘big winners’. Sure, there are lots of examples of ‘web activities’, for instance:

• Blogs e.g. clinical cases and images, BMJ editors and even this blog!
• Social networks e.g. sermo
• Wikis e.g. ganfyd, AskDrWiki
• Social bookmarking e.g. connotea

But none of these, as far as I can tell, have made in-roads into mainstream healthcare. As such, I’m starting to have my doubts. Has the hype caused me ignore one of my own rules – DO NOT BE LEAD BY TECHNOLOGY, BE LEAD BY THE USER?

It would appear that I’m not alone in my scepticism and this has just been addressed in the Health Care Blog, with the post ‘Balloon Mania: Happy Birthday Health 2.0‘. I’m not won over by the anecdote used but it does remind me that it’s very early days…

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…