Human 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."

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/openevidence-chatgpt-for-doc...

▲ something98 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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kjellsbells 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The problems isnt LLMs per se, it is the shift to trusting the output of the machine coupled with a decline in verifying that the output is reasonable. It's basically what your teachers warned you about with wikipedia in eight grade except applied to all areas of life, including medicine. Dictation is already high-stakes and LLMs do not automatically reduce that risk.

Here is an example. My provider sent me this note. I'm quoting verbatim here from my MyChart record:

"Your liver enzymes are high, I would like to order acetaminophen containing medication like Tylenol, I would like to order liver ultrasound I placed ultrasound order in the system, make an appointment for radiology, I would like you to get hepatitis panel lab work done, obtain blood work order, please schedule a well visit to get it done"

When I queried it, this is what I got back. It was a dictation error. You could almost hear the panic in the message:

"Sorry for wrong message earlier, I was dictated message- so could not realize that it was written to take Tylenol type of medicines- I DO NOT RECOMMEND ACETAMINOPHEN CONTAINING MEDICINE - LIKE TYLENOL AND ALCOHOL DUE TO ELEVATED LIVER ENZYMES."

Again the problem is not dictation, or LLMs. The problem is humans ignoring their responsibility to check the output of a machine.

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brokencode 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OpenEvidence is specifically meant to help clinicians make evidence-based decisions in the diagnosis and treatment of patients, not note transcription.

	▲	sxg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It does both: https://www.openevidence.com/user-guide/visits-overview

▲ sarchertech 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.