Sorting out symptoms: design and evaluation of the 'babylon check' automated triage system
This addresses the issue of patient anxiety from diagnostic systems for users of online medical resources, though it appears incremental as it focuses on triage advice rather than a novel breakthrough.
The paper tackled the problem of cyberchondria in automated symptom checkers by developing a triage system that advises on where to seek help rather than providing a diagnosis, and it evaluated this system in a large deployment study.
Prior to seeking professional medical care it is increasingly common for patients to use online resources such as automated symptom checkers. Many such systems attempt to provide a differential diagnosis based on the symptoms elucidated from the user, which may lead to anxiety if life or limb-threatening conditions are part of the list, a phenomenon termed 'cyberchondria' [1]. Systems that provide advice on where to seek help, rather than a diagnosis, are equally popular, and in our view provide the most useful information. In this technical report we describe how such a triage system can be modelled computationally, how medical insights can be translated into triage flows, and how such systems can be validated and tested. We present babylon check, our commercially deployed automated triage system, as a case study, and illustrate its performance in a large, semi-naturalistic deployment study.