John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Archive for November 27th, 2006
Diagnosis Google Style
November 27, 2006
Lots of buzz on the British Medical Journal article on Googling for a diagnosis–use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study. The study showed “Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%).
The comments on the BMJ website related to this article are equally interesting: “Pubmedding is better than googling” and Google Medicine – proceed with caution and this quote: “Google’s accuracy of 58%, reported by Tang and Ng, is less than that achieved by older generation rules based Diagnosis Decision Support System [3] and will not engender widespread adoption.” In fact, would you be confident of this kind of percentage.
Perhaps a more realistic test would be to give two physican panels test cases and two different tools sets – a decision support tool like Micromedix and the other just Google and see how accurate they become.
At any rate, the article provokes more discussion and research.
