I’ve been particularly pleased with the reception the specialist TRIP sites have received. We’ve had more feedback on these than any other feature that I can remember. One loud ‘shout out’ was for a Critical Care TRIP. Always, willing to please (!) I have now published the Critical Care TRIP which was produced with help from a number of people, but special mentions to Lisa Lawrence from Derby City General Hospital and Barry Markovitz (PedsCCM)
Not sure where to start with this one, but 2007 has been one busy and exciting year!
Clinical Q&A
Over 1,700 clinical questions answered. We’ve managed to maintain our very high satisfaction rates and we’ve got quicker. Approximately 85% have been answered within 24 hours.
Takeover. We flirted briefly with being bought out by a European-based PLC.
TRIP Database
To date (in 2007) we’ve been searched over 5,500,000 times this year – a staggering figure. Of these around 100,000 were mis-spellings (and corrected by our systems).
There has also been the release of two upgrades the most recent saw us reveal 26 specialist search engines. These have been very well received and are already being widely used. The following are the top 5 (the figures in brackets are the usage in the last 4 weeks):
- Pediatrics (3,855)
- Obs & Gynae (3,562)
- Cardiology (3,239)
- Urology (3,132)
- Orthopedics (2,940)
Interestingly, Sian (my other half) suggested that we could re-name the Obs & Gynae search to TRIPova – which amused me no end.
The review of our users was worth doing, click here to see the results. I was most pleased by the search success of our users.
What about 2008?
TRIP Database – Some minor upgrades are planned for early 2008 as well as the first TRIP in non-English released by mid-2008. I’m hoping to reach 1 million searches per month by the end of 2008.
Clinical Q&A – Onwards and upwards I hope.
New projects – We have got one very large project planned for mid-2008. We’re hoping to start work on this in early 2008. However, it’ll require a significant amount of effort to get ready for launch. It’s in the broad area of Q&A and I’m fairly confident that it’ll have a massive impact. I don’t remember being as excited about a project before!
Finally, I’d like to thank those involved with TRIP over the year, including:
- Rosalind
- Chris
- Eleri
- Lynne
- Ben
- Dean
- Michelle
- David
- Toni
- Tiffany
- NLH
- Rich, Steve and Phil (and the rest of Sequence)
- Shona
- Lisa
- Judith
- Martin
- Iain
- Paul
- And all the others who I hope I haven’t offended by leaving off but have helped considerably!
It’s that time of year! We’ve reviewed all our searches and the following are the top papers viewed from TRIP for 2007.
- Management of enteral tube feeding CREST, 2004
- Growth reference charts Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, 2000
- Insulin sliding scale Ganfyd, 2007
- Which oral antibiotics interact with alcohol? NeLM, 2006
- Is there a list of drugs where alcohol should be avoided? NLH Q&A Service, 2005
- What is the relavance of poor R-wave progression with an otherwise normal ecg? NLH Q&A Service, 2005
- Guidelines on the management of cellulitis in adults CREST, 2005
- Standards for infusion therapy RCN, 2005
- Sexually Transmitted Infections in Primary Care RCGP, 2006
- Nutrition support in adults NICE, 2006
The top ten were viewed, from TRIP, a total of 51,301 times!
We’re very pleased to announce that the NLH Q&A Service (a service we run) has been nominated for NHS Website of the Year as part of the Health Business Awards.
Apparently, we’re up against two other NHS sites 18 Weeks Delivery Programme and Choose and Book.
The awards are next Thursday, so time to dust off the suit – fortunately, it’s not black tie!
I signed up years ago to be an Amazon affiliate and never really did much. This weekend I went back and had a look. They can offer some pretty powerful tools! I knowed this up TRIP Bookshop in around 3 hours.
I’ve still got to plug it into TRIP and the specialist search engines. I’ve also got to create a system that detects users from overseas and directs them to other stores.
I’m amazed at how good it looks with so little effort!
Apologies for those trying to get to NICE documents via TRIP – the majority don’t work.
Fortunately (!!), this isn’t our fault. NICE have moved over to a new CMS and as such the bulk of the old URLs are defunct. Initially, the changes were introduced with no re-direct. However, they appear to have introduced a minor fix – which doesn’t work on TRIP.
Bottom line: I’ve re-indexed the guidelines and technology appraisals and they should be ‘searchable’ over the weekend.
We recently ran a survey via TRIP and one of the questions was:
“TRIP prides itself in being a great tool to allow health professionals to answer their own questions. If you use TRIP for this purpose would you be interested in adding the answers to your clinical questions to TRIP?”
We received the following results:
- Yes – great idea (31%)
- Probably – interesting idea (43%)
- Maybe – not really sure it’ll work (20%)
- No – it’ll never work (6%)
So, why the question and so what?
We answer a large number of questions (50+) and over the years we’ve answered more than 10,000 (of which 7,000+ are online). However, we answer a small proportion of the total healthcare questions answered. Most of the questions are answered by clinicians themselves. Wouldn’t it be good to create a framework to allow these Q&As to be shared? Also, TRIP is designed to help clinicians (and ourselves) answer clinical questions. So if a clinician answers a question using TRIP, it makes sense to share the fruits with other TRIP users.
There are numerous issues around quality. But now seems as good a time as ever to try and better gauge potential demand. Therefore, if you use TRIP to answer your own clinical questions AND would contemplate sharing these can you please let me know. Either via the ‘Contact us‘ form or via jon [@] tripdatabase.com
This post is the first in a ‘Highlight a TRIP feature’, to start with we’ll be giving some information on our new ‘More’ section.
Prior to our latest upgrade we included a number of wiki-based content providers including Ganfyd and Ask Dr Wiki. However, the slight problem is that wikis are ‘works in progress’ and frequently the content could be considered not robust enough! However, the problem is that wikis have some great content and we feel they need exposure.
At the same time there is an increasing volume of webcasts and podcasts becoming available. Again, valuable content and not searchable from other sources.
To house all this content we created the ‘More’ section. In many ways it could be considered a miscellaneous section, but ‘more’ sounds better and lets us create the tag line ‘TRIP Evidence Base and More’
Currently, the ‘More’ section contains over 6,000 wiki articles and more than 2,500 web and podcasts.
When doing a search you can easily view the ‘More’ content by clicking on the link – see below.
Wow, only just caught my breath after an intense, post-launch week.
Miraculously, no major hitches. The algorithm has been behaving itself, although I got an anxious e-mail telling me a load of evidence has gone missing. This was due to a new feature we’d introduced that allows the system to remove results if the text score is too low. In other words if the search terms are barely mentioned in the document it’ll score low. It appears that I set it too high, so I’ve removed that for now.
Our specialist search sites have continued to grow and we’ve had feedback from a few publications who we’ve included. Below is an updated usage chart, the blue bars represent usage, from launch, to Friday 16th while the red bars are usage to today.
We’re aware of a few usabilty issues so we’re working on those.
As a heavy user of TRIP I still find the moving around of the results categories confusing. Where Q&A used to be is now EB synopses, so that’ll take some getting used to.
One final thing, we added a load of webcasts and podcasts at launch and the most popular is the NEJM video on Pelvic Examination which has been viewed 27 times.
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