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.

Share this:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • StumbleUpon
  • Pinterest
  • Add to favorites
  • Email
  • RSS

Leave a Reply