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Researchers at Harvard Medical School tested 23 different symptom checkers.
Online symptom checkers and apps only provided the correct diagnosis about a third of the time, but could still be worthwhile compared to Dr. Google, a new study suggests.
People are asked to list their symptoms and then a computerized algorithm suggests whether to seek medical care immediately, like for a heart attack or stroke, visit a doctor in the next few days or just rest at home. “A recent study found that when typing acute symptoms that would require urgent medical attention into search engines to identify symptom-related web sites, advice to seek emergent care was present only 64 percent of the time”.
Clarifying how and why patients use these tools is critical, say the study’s authors.
The study tried the top 23 symptoms checker sites across four different countries like the Netherlands, United States, United Kingdom and Poland.
“Their performance is not flawless by any means and should not be treated as gospel”, Mehrotra said in an email.
“The public is increasingly interested in using the Internet for self-diagnosis, and increasingly they are using symptom checkers”.
“Our results imply that in many cases symptom checkers can give the user a sense of possible diagnoses but also provide a note of caution, as the tools are frequently wrong and the triage advice overly cautious”, wrote co-authors Hannah Semigran and Ateev Mehrota.
“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”, Mehrotra added in a paper that appeared in the British Medical Journal.
Like the telephone triage lines they may eventually displace, symptom checkers tended to send people for care when staying at home might be reasonable, the researchers found.
The researchers said that the correct diagnosis in the first time was only one-third of the time. The only saving grace is that the checkers were generally decent at recommending immediate emergency care when encountered with urgent, potentially life-threatening symptoms, at about 80 percent.
“The risk averse nature of symptom checkers” triage advice is a concern. Those high results, Maude says, may be because the site lets patients type in their own description of symptoms. “Diagnosis and triage rates could also be improved if symptom checkers incorporated individual clinical data from medical claims or the electronic medical record”. A concerning diagnosis could fuel cyberchondria – escalated anxiety from self-diagnosing online.
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This study was funded by the USA National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant #R21 AI097759-01).
