LONDON: Online symptom checkers often misdiagnose patients’ problems, frequently encouraging people to seek care for minor issues that don’t need immediate attention and other times incorrectly telling people with true emergencies that treatment can wait, a UK study suggests.
Researchers tested 23 online and mobile apps. The apps were imperfect at best, offering the correct diagnosis on the first try only about a third of the time.
For triage – assessing the urgency of the problem – the apps were too cautious in situations requiring only self-care: only 33 percent of the time, on average, were patients appropriately advised not to go to the doctor.
At the other extreme, symptom checkers typically missed the severity of the situation in one of every five cases requiring emergency treatment.
Overall, the computer programs offered accurate triage advice for 57 percent of the standardised scenarios.
“The risk is that people will be told to get care when they didn’t need it or they will be told not to seek care when they have a life-threatening problem,” senior author Dr Ateev Mehrotra said.
Because patients may not get much useful information from a long list of possible diagnoses, the researchers rated the symptom-checkers based on whether the programs spit out the right answer first.
The software listed the right diagnosis first in 24 percent of emergencies on average, and for 40 percent of non-urgent cases. Accuracy was better for common than for rare diagnoses.
The app that did best was DocResponse.com, at 50 percent. Accuracy was better for the systems that used Schmitt or Thompson nurse triage protocols, standard diagnostic tools used by clinicians to provide advice over the phone. – Reuters Health