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Research

Evaluation of symptom checkers for self diagnosis and triage: audit study

BMJ 2015; 351 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h3480 (Published 08 July 2015) Cite this as: BMJ 2015;351:h3480

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Comparison to physicians would make this a more meaningful study

It would be useful to know the rate of accuracy of physicians on the cases that were used in this study, rather than rely on published statistics for physicians being accurate 85-90% of the time.

In general, for studies of decision support tools, it is important to have controls that allow comparison to the best available alternative. In a study that we carried out of the efficacy of the diagnostic decision support tool SimulConsult (restricted to medical professionals, and thus excluded from this study) we compared how physicians did without the tool and with the tool (Segal MM et al. (2014) J Child Neurol. 29:487-92; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23576414).

The best model for diagnostic decision support is likely to be one of enhancing the efficacy of medical professionals, not replacing them.

Competing interests: Dr. Segal is the founder of SimulConsult

10 July 2015
Michael Segal
Physician (MD PhD)
SimulConsult
27 Crafts Road, Brookline MA 02467, USA