Software and online services checking for symptoms of illnesses are meant to uncover a possible disease or infection a person is suffering from. However, a recent report suggests that people should not rely on online symptom checkers as they may not always give appropriate advice.
Cold, dizziness, and sore throat are some of the common medical conditions that millions of people experience. However, with the emergence of the Internet, many people are in the habit of going online and searching for symptoms of their disease.
Most of the free online symptom checkers are offered by insurance companies, medical schools, government agencies and more.
A new study conducted by researchers at the Harvard Medical School, however, investigated 23 online symptom checkers from the UK, U.S., Poland and the Netherlands. Some of these online symptom checkers are run by well-known brands, such as the Mayo Clinic and WebMD, while some are run by lesser known brands.
The study evaluated 45 patient scenarios on each of the 23 symptom checkers. Out of the total scenarios, 15 needed non-emergency care, 15 required emergency care and the rest may have needed self-care but did not require a medical visit. The cases included 19 uncommon and 26 common diagnoses.
The medical checkers varied in accuracy about the advice given, but they were all quite inaccurate. The researchers discovered that online symptom checkers gave correct advice only about one-third of the time, which means that majority of the primary advice was inaccurate.
"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," reported the researchers in the study published in BMJ.
The study also analyzed the triage advice accuracy: whether a patient should seek professional medical care or not. The researchers learned that the online symptom checkers gave appropriate advice about 57 percent of the time. Four websites, namely iTriage, Isabel, Symcat and Symtomate, always recommended users to seek professional care.
The research findings suggest online symptom checkers are as accurate as telephone triage.
A major chunk of adults and teens in the U.S. use such virtual medical services, despite the fact that developers of online symptom checkers do not seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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