Telehealth on the rise, page-2544

"ALCp mentioned which ResApp ran where apparently it was found that the clinical results showed that the app worked better than a stethoscope" – You have been diverted by a poster who consistently makes foolish, ill-founded posts. The whole question of "better or worse than a stethoscope" is meaningless in the context of the clinical trials. I'll come back to this shortly.

But firstly, there have been several well-structured clinical studies conducted over the years. You can find a comprehensive list of these studies on the Resapp Health website. The earlier studies (up to 2017) were focused on gathering training data. Later studies were double-blinded prospective trials testing the efficacy of the algorithm. The results have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals. If you're looking for the specific trial that the idiot poster referred to, it is here: A prospective multicentre study testing the diagnostic accuracy of an automated cough sound centred analytic system for the identification of common respiratory disorders in children

It's almost certain that the idiot didn't read the actual paper, but was referring to the company's announcement referring to these results, which is here: ResApp Achieves Breakthrough Performance in Paediatric Clinical Study

Now to the issue of stethoscopes. None of the studies compared the algorithm specifically to the results obtained by a clinician using a stethoscope. The algorithm's predictions were compared to the diagnosis for the target conditions using the full range of diagnostic tests including stethoscope, chest x-rays, sample culture, etc. The stethoscope comment was an observation relating to a specific type of condition and shows why a hospital won't rely solely on a doctor with a stethoscope, but will conduct a battery of other tests regardless of what the clinician can hear.

The trials don't answer the question "is it better or worse than a stethoscope", they answer the question "is it as good as the whole constellation of various tests done to diagnose the condition". And the answer is "it's pretty damn close!"

So this whole discussion of whether ResappDx can replace a doctor with a stethoscope is essentially irrelevant.

The trials show that ResappDx can pretty much replace the doctor with the stethoscope, and the chest x-rays, and the sample cultures, and the ventolin-to-exclude-asthma, and the start-on-antibiotics-and-we'll-check-again-in-72-hours.