Prediabetes Risk in Adult Americans According to a Risk Test

Discussion | In what we believe to be the first direct comparison of diagnostic accuracy, physicians vastly outperformed computer algorithms in diagnostic accuracy (84.3% vs 51.2% correct diagnosis in the top 3 listed).4 Despite physicians’ superior performance, they provided the incorrect diagnosis in about 15% of cases, similar to prior estimates (10%-15%) for physician diagnostic error.5 While in this project we compared diagnostic performance, future work should test whether computer algorithms can augment physician diagnostic accuracy.6 Key limitations included our use of clinical vignettes, which likely do not reflect the complexity of real-world patients and did not include physical examination or test results. Physicians who chose to use Human Dx may not be a representative sample of US physicians and therefore may differ in diagnostic accuracy. Symptom checkers are only 1 form of computer diagnostic tools, and other tools may have superior performance.