Your phone may be smart, but your doctor still knows more than an app

If you're feeling sick and you want to know what's wrong with you, there's an app for that. But the diagnosis won't be as accurate as the one you'd get from a doctor -- not by a long shot. In a head-to-head comparison, real human physicians outperformed a collection of 23 symptom-checker apps and websites by a margin of more than 2 to 1, according to a report published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Even when the contestants got three chances to figure out what ailed a hypothetical patient, the diagnostic software lagged far behind actual doctors. Indeed, the apps and websites suggested the right diagnosis only slightly more than half of the time, the report says.