Given what inputs? Doctors don’t seem to be very competent at diagnosing things without a bunch of very expensive tests for unrelated things first and even then it’s just weeding out what it isn’t rather than accurately predicting what disease a person has.
I don't know if IBM created anything in this area back then, but the MYCIN expert system was developed in the 1970s at Stanford. MYCIN was shown to outperform infectious disease experts by 1979 in a blind testing:
>... Eight independent evaluators with special expertise in the management of meningitis compared MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%. The system never failed to cover a treatable pathogen while demonstrating efficiency in minimizing the number of antimicrobials prescribed.
I wish I had the link to the YouTube video where a researcher described one of the main reasons why MYCIN failed. Because when you optimize for number of patients per doctor, it is a lot more cost effective to prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic that kills all pathogens and move on to the next patient than it is to spend time with one patient and MYCIN to narrow down to the exact pathogen.
And that worked out well! When you optimize for reducing costs, not outcomes, the outcome you get is antibiotic resistant bacteria!
Seriously though, if we take a "maximize outcomes" approach, then doctors don't actually need to spend any time with a patient - the computer can do it. Maybe this isn't optimal for wealthy first-worlders, but it will be better than what poor first-worlders and everybody else have now. Many people in the US simply do not go to the doctor, unless it's an unavoidable ER trip.
