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OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

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Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely to me that doctors whose job is almost or entirely about making diagnoses and prescribing treatments won't be able to keep up in the long run, where those who are more patient facing will still be around even after AI is better than us at just about everything. If I were picking a specialty now, I'd go with pediatrics or psychiatry over something like oncology.

You are confusing the job with a subset of tasks. Some tasks can be automated, some won't. That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone.

> That doesn't mean LLMs, which cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry, will replace anyone.

But most of us live in America in 2026. There are a lot of interests that don't give a shit about you who would love if you to got your medical care from a machine that "cannot tell how many r's are in strawberry". And there a lot of useful idiots with no real medical issues who will loudly claim the machine is great.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#402
post #233

As a 60yo I developed my own AI medical assistant [1] and I've used it extensively for many conditions, I can't be happier. After analyzing some lab tests it even recommended a marker that was not considered first by the doctor, so yes, it won't replace doctors but it is a very helpful tool for self-diagnosing simple conditions and second opinions. [1] https://mediconsulta.net (DeepSeek)

Very cool! Just a heads up, the "Pricing" button in the navbar currently has no redirect.

It used to have a pricing section but I removed it to make it free for everybody. I'll fix that, thanks.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#403
post #233

As a 60yo I developed my own AI medical assistant [1] and I've used it extensively for many conditions, I can't be happier. After analyzing some lab tests it even recommended a marker that was not considered first by the doctor, so yes, it won't replace doctors but it is a very helpful tool for self-diagnosing simple conditions and second opinions. [1] https://mediconsulta.net (DeepSeek)

Interesting. From your website I couldn't see where you are based. The reason I'm asking is that I'd only consider using these types of services if they are European/UK based.

I live in Venezuela, hosting in US, AI in China, if that helps.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the training data is absolute garbage. Diagnostic standards in (at least emergency, but I think other specialties) medicine are largely a joke -- ultimately it's often either autopsy or "expert consensus." We get to bill more for more serious diagnoses. The amount of patients I see with a "stroke" or "heart attack" diagnosis that clearly had no such thing is truly wild. We can be sued for tens of millio…

You just get 1M doctors to wear body cams for a year. Now you have a model that has thousands of times your experience with patients, encyclopedic knowledge of every ailment including ones that never present in your geography, read all the latest papers, etc.. I don't understand how you think this doesn't win vs a human doctor.

How is training on bad data going to give you better results than the current system?

What kind of embedding helps the AI learn to do a physical exam?

Not to mention patient privacy, I can't even take a still photo of a patient in my current system (even with a hospital-owned camera).

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#405
post #11

I'd be very very hesitant to trust studies like this. It's very easy to mess up these benchmarks. See for example this recent paper where AI managed to beat radiologists on interpreting x-rays... when the AI didn't even have access to the x-rays: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687 (on a pre existing "large scale visual question answering benchmark for generalist chest x-ray understanding" that wasn't intentionally mess…

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

The reason is because one scenario just requires your imagination to facilitate a reality that currently doesn't exist (Doctor AI) vs actual experience which is messier and has more details than a story about the future.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#406
post #277

I know a cardiologist who founded a training & knowledge base startup for doctors. He once told me (that was before LLMs), that it’s super common to tell a patient that the doc needs to look up sthg in their patient history, to then instead google the symptoms. Or, even more often, quickly text a colleague. I have no way of knowing if this is true. But I‘d rather had a complete, guided prompt be the basis of a diagno…

> quickly text a colleague.

This is still common and useful to gut check and make sure you aren't missing something. Source: wife is a doctor.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#407
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

If you read the study, the whole conclusion is much less spectacular than the article. What the article really pushes happened: patients -> AI -> diagnosis (you know, with a camera, or perhaps a telephone I guess) What REALLY happened patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question (as in MD asked a relevant diagnostic question, such as "is this the result of a lung infection?", or "what lab te…

> However it was very much a nurse or MD taking the symptoms and an MD pre-digesting the data for to the AI.

Excellent. We should be striving for a world where humans are meat puppets for machines.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.

> In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.

Even if your statement is true, it's questionable. People also tend to prefer hearing what they want to hear to hearing what they need to hear, and rank the former interaction higher.

Basically, tech's favorite feedback mechanism, customer reviews, cannot actually be relied upon to tell you how good something is.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this too. But the past couple of years have soured my taste for "dismantle and replace" of vital institutions. I still think healthcare needs to be reformed, and I hope that insurance will someday be a thing of a past, but I've hung up my chain saw for now.

It's increased mine if it works for the repugnant morons in government right now we can use the same playbook for positive change.

It is statements like this that convince me we haven't learned anything and are doomed to ever wider pendulum swings.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#410
If this is repeatable and holds true across testing groups and practitioners that would be amazing! Doctors could finally spend time with patients rather than rushing to probe, document, test and diagnose. They are so pressed to maximize their time that any time back could go straight into real care. Am I being blindly optimistic here?
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