Home

Emerging Tech

News

AI beat doctors in emergency triage, but don’t fire your physician yet

Amazon

AI has plenty of messy use cases , but emergency medicine may be one place where it can do some real good. A Harvard study comparing AI performance against doctors using patient data from emergency-room cases revealed that OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model outperformed human doctors in emergency triage diagnosis , especially in cases where decisions had to be made quickly with limited information.

NEC Corporation of America / Flickr (Creative Commons)

What did the test reveal?

A part of the Harvard trial included 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. The AI model and two human doctors were given the same electronic health record, including basic details like vital signs, demographic information, and a short nurse-written note explaining why the patient had come in.

The AI managed to identify the exact or near-exact diagnosis 67% of cases.…