A new study suggests that online diagnostic and symptoms checkers can be of great assistance when it comes to providing a guided care to very ill patients.
These web-based tools can be of immense help for patients who are trying to make a decision if they are supposed to get a doctor quickly or not.
Senior study author Ateev Mehrotra, associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, said, “But in many cases, users should be cautious and not take the information they receive from online symptom checkers as gospel.”
There are cases when receiving the exact diagnosis may not be as important as getting the right advice about whether or how quickly one needs to consult a doctor.
Mehrotra added in a paper that was published in the British Medical Journal, that, “It is not nearly as important for a patient with fever, headache, stiff neck and confusion to know whether they have meningitis or encephalitis as it is for them to know that they should get to a doctor quickly.”
The researchers have fashioned a standardized list of symptoms from 45 clinical vignettes for testing the symptom checkers, that are actually employed for teaching and testing medical students. After that, they listed those symptoms into 23 different online symptom checkers such as Isabel, iTriage, Mayo Clinic, Symcat and more.
The studied software algorithms has listed the accurate diagnosis the first 34% of the cases and it was included in the top three diagnoses in the list in 51% of cases and in the top 20 in 58%.
About 23 symptom checkers have provided the correct advice in 58% of the cases with checkers having a much enhanced performance in the more critical cases, appropriately making recommendations of emergency care in 80% of the urgent cases.
The first study author Hannah Semigran, research assistant in health care policy, said, “With symptom trackers, we are looking at the first generation of a new technology. It is important to continue to track their performance to see if they can reach their full potential in helping patients get the right care.”
