
By By Lisa Rapaport | Reuters – 10 hours ago
(Reuters Health) – Online symptom checkers often misdiagnose patients’ problems, often 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 U.K. study suggests.
Researchers tested 23 online and mobile apps used by millions of people who are trying to find out if their symptoms are serious and what might make them feel better. 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 standardized scenarios that were used in the researchers’ tests.
“The risk is that people will be told to get care when they didn’t need it and bear the costs and inconvenience, or they will be told not to seek care when they have a life-threatening problem,” senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said by email.
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, or somewhere lower down on a list of up to 20 possible alternative diagnoses.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/online-symptom-checkers-often-wrong-220336492.html