alt Hacker NewsHuman doctors use LLMs to diagnose too
OpenEvidence claims
"More than 40% of U.S. physicians use it daily, and it handled around 20 million clinical consultations per month. Over 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using it in 2025."
Replies
sarchertech • yesterday at 6:41 PM
Ignoring the fact that this number comes from a company press release, it doesn’t say anything about the number of doctors using it to diagnose, just that they use it.
If a physician uses Google to search for a dosage chart for some drug they rarely prescribe, you wouldn’t say they are using Google to diagnose the patient. You wouldn’t say that either if they used Google to search for the most recent studies on a topic.
sambellll • yesterday at 6:48 PM
To me this is like a good software engineer using AI.
The fact that they use it doesn't make what the result is any worse or less trustworthy - arguably it makes it better.
It only becomes a problem if they offload all of the thinking to AI.
This is a very misleading statement; most of those physicians are using LLMs to transcribe notes from visits and/or for billing purposes (e.g., proper billing codes).