The new version of TRIP will now be released at the start of September and this will include a significantly enhanced My-TRIP.
Unfortunately, as we’re using new technology the two versions are not compatible. Therefore, if users of My-TRIP have information they want to save, they should save it between now and the end of August.
We’re sorry for any problems this may cause, but this inconvenience will be worth it for the boost in functionality.
We have just added July’s monthly update of 807 new records, which includes the 3rd edition of Cochrane. In addition to this manual upload our automated systems will be grabbing additional content from the likes of guidelines.gov and PubMed.
This new content should be searchable in the next 1-3 days.
I’ve been talking with HIFA2015 which is a campaign group hoping to improve access (for patients and health professionals) to health information in developing nations. I commented that, given most of the content of TRIP is aimed at richer nations, it makes it more difficult for users from poorer nations to identify material appropriate for their context.
I’ve thought of a rather simple solution – allow users of TRIP to identify such content. Basically, someone does a search and in the results they see a resource suitable for poorer nations – they click a button next to the record and this is tagged as being suitable for resource poor nations. When someone does a search they could press a button and then restrict the results to ‘resource poor’. To start with this wouldn’t be particularly useful – but with 25,000+ visits a day I’m sure it’d work quite well within a short space of time.
There are quality issues that need working through, and we’re working on these. But I’m hoping this might be a reasonably efficient mechanism to solve a difficult problem.
This paper “Junior physician’s use of Web 2.0 for information seeking and medical education: A qualitative study” has caught the imagination of some of the bloggers I read and admire. The conclusion of the above paper reads:
Web 2.0 use represents a profound departure from previous learning and decision processes which were normally controlled by senior medical staff or medical schools. There is widespread concern with the risk of poor quality information with Web 2.0 use, and the manner in which physicians are using it suggest effective use derives from the mitigating actions by the individual physician. Three alternative policy options are identified to manage this risk and improve efficiency in Web 2.0’s use.
@amcunningham blogged about this on Tuesday (click here) while @DrVes blogged yesterday (click here). Two different angles on the paper, both worth a read!
Things are getting very hectic at TRIP!
As I’ve mentioned previously we’re having a massive overhaul of the site. Coupled to that, as you’ll see from my last post, we’ve been setting up an advisory board. The board is now set-up and the results of which are starting to be realised. The group consists of 70 people with around 50% clinicians, 40% information specialists and the remainder being an esoteric mix. The board is run through Ning, which appears to work very well.
There is still an opportunity to join the board, if you’re interested let me know via jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com
We’re planning on launching the new site towards the end of this month so until then I’ll be quiet on the blog.
TRIP has grown and matured as a site considerably over the years and this change has been particularly rapid in the last 12 months. The next upgrade will mark a significant improvement and it’s a momentum I wish to maintain. To help TRIP in this process I’ve decided to set-up an advisory board.
The TRIP advisory board will be an informal network of clinicians, information specialists and techies and I would expect it to serve the following functions:
If you are at all interested please e-mail me via jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com
Please don’t be shy, I’d love to hear from you!
This might sound strange but Martin, if you read this I’d like to hear from you, the old e-mail I have doesn’t seem to work!
One massive obstacle to serving up decent search results in a search engine is trying to understand the intention behind the search. The majority of searches undertaken are 1-2 terms e.g. hypertension, diabetes, prostate cancer, migraine triptans. In the latter it might seem obvious they are interested in the therapeutics efficacy of triptans in the treatment of migraine. However, they might be interested in side-effects, prognosis etc.
It’s a tough challenge.
In the new TRIP we’re proposing two ‘features’ to help us deliver even better results:
So, we hope to benefit from a users location and specialism to serve better content, if anyone can think of anything else – feel free to let me know!
After seeing a couple of twitter-based book clubs including one created by Jonathan Ross I thought ‘why not create a twitter journal club’. So I sent a ‘tweet’ out and it seems to have caught the imagination of a number of people.
So, why not start a twitter-based JC? To be honest, aside from the big picture, I’ve got no idea how it might work. So, if you’ve got a view let me know. Otherwise, I’ll have to think of something 😉
Around 4 weeks we blogged that Clinical Correlations was to be the first blogs whose content would be added to TRIP.
Yesterday, I identified the 2nd blog to be added to TRIP, the rather nice TrustTheEvidence, created by Carl Heneghan, a GP and Deputy Director of the CEBM and Ami Banerjee, Cardiology trainee and clinical research fellow at the University of Oxford. Highly recommended – and they also have a twitter account http://twitter.com/cebmblog
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