Trip Database Blog

Long-Term Patterns of Online Evidence Retrieval Use in General Practice has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Conclusion: GPs will use an online evidence retrieval system in routine practice; however, usage rates drop significantly after initial introduction of the system. Long-term studies are required to determine the extent to which GPs will integrate the use of such technologies into their everyday clinical practice and how this will affect the satisfaction and health outcomes of their patients

Hardly a huge surprise. But I think the whole study is limited as the average number of searches per month was 0.7! I think the authors discussion lacked imagination. They didn’t consider that the search wasn’t producing the results, so the docs got tired of asking the question and getting nothing back.

They quote Ely in their paper and I think it was Ely who highlighted that doctors tend to seek information when they think they’ll get an answer.

For those who have missed in Dean Giustini has an interesting paper on web 3.0. It’s a term I don’t particularly like but perhaps that’s because I don’t understand it properly. Anyway, the paper is Web 3.0 and health librarians: an introduction.

Interestingly I’ve been approached by a Prof of information retrieval whose supervising a student looking at clinical Q&A. As part of the discussion we started talking about the semantic web (which appears pretty much a synonym of web 3.0). She explained it like this…

In the ‘conventional web you would probably use the same search terms for both these questions:

1. Does asthma lead to obesity
2. Does obesity lead to asthma

For me I’d start with asthma obesity and see what came up. They’d be some papers discussing obese people’s risk of asthma, they’d be others discussing the risk asthmatics have of becoming obese and I imagine they’d be a load of reviews discussing chronic diseases which discuss them both.

In the semantic web they would be an ‘understanding’ of the relationship between the search terms/concepts and the way these terms are then represented in documents.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the sum of my knowledge. As it looks like we’ll not be involved in Q&A for the NLH for much longer I think I’ll have lots of time to explore this concept…

I saw a post about a new version on PBwiki and thought I’d try it out. So what have I put on there, various bits and bobs I’ve found interesting and useful over the years of answering clinical questions. So far there are not many pages and it’ll no doubt grow. This is not meant to be any significant new resource from TRIP, its just there as it’ll be useful to me and potentially for others.

To view the TRIPwiki click here.

Oh yes, you may get some screen suggesting an upgrade, this can be ignored by clicking on the link ‘take me to the wiki’ in the bottom right-hand corner.

As a new feature (to be rolled out shortly) we’ve produced a video of TRIP. It’s a quick run through the main features of TRIP, so new users can quickly get a feel of what we’re about.

We’ve placed it on YouTube, (as well as embedding it below) as you’ll see the quality is lousy – the resolution is too low. When we launch the video on TRIP it’ll be much higher in quality.

We added AFP to TRIP around ten days ago and it’s already (for me) proved a useful addition.

So what news greeted me ten minutes ago – restricted access (see below)! It’s not as draconian as it could be (only most recent 12 months will be restricted) but it’s a step back….

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has announced that beginning in April 2008, it will restrict online access to new issues of its journals, American Family Physician and Family Practice Management, to AAFP members and paid subscribers.

New journal articles will be restricted for a period of 12 months, after which time they will be available on the “public side” of www.aafp.org/afp and www.aafp.org/fpm, where 90% of the journals’ content will continue to reside. Previously, 100% of AFP and FPM content has been available online without a subscription.

TechCrunch highlights SearchMe. I like this! I’m not sure how useful it’d be for clinical search, but I still like it!!!

Around two weeks ago I blogged about TRIP being slow!

Today, I had a very good meeting with our web-team and we’ve located a key problem and highlighted a solution….

When someone does a search of TRIP it doesn’t just do one search it, in effect, does a search for each category (systematic reviews, EB synopses etc) – so that’s 9 searches! Last month we were searched 853,959 times, so the poor processors had to carry out 7,685,631 searches.

So the solution we’re going to work with is something called a rolling cache. This will cache a load of search results on a rolling 30 day basis. So, on day one, someone will search on asthma, we will do all 9 searches on that day (one for systematic reviews, one for EB synopses etc) but then those results will be stored in a cache. The next time someone searches on asthma we’ll take the results, not from carrying out the 9 searches, but from the cache. Bottom line we should see a significant improvement in speed…

Just as well as the rest of the meeting was discussing the 4 major projects that will be rolled out over the next year.

For interest, the NLH Mental Health Specialist Library has a google discussion group (click here).

I never suggest that I’m great at proof reading and the partial screenshot from the homepage proves this beyond doubt! Click on the picture to enlarge!

The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Oxford and TRIP are currently working on a joint project looking at the relationship between evidence and experience.

To start with we’re looking for clinicians with experience of treating depression or patients who have ever suffered from depression to undertake a brief online survey.

• Click here to take the survey
• Click here to return to TRIP