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.
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