[cmonsen]

The evidence suggests that 15% of medical diagnoses are incorrect. Being 2 months away from finishing my MD, I have a sense that this is not because doctors are failing to do their job, but rather, because medical diagnosis is hard.

Most people believe that their doctor gives them a diagnosis and are 100% certain of it, but in reality medicine is a highly probabilistic domain. There's a great article about a family's story with misdiagnosis in their child (http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/07/how_f...). The diagnosis was initially strep, but it soon became evident that the diagnosis was the much more rare Kawasaki disease. Symcat is an attempt to let patients know about both (ie "This is probably strep, but you should continue to monitor because Kawasaki disease can also cause this and the only way you know is if your symptoms persist").

We would love to get more docs on board and we've been working with physicians at Hopkins to make this as useful to patients as possible.

Completely agree that this lives on the quality of the data. We would like for users to contribute their data (a la patientslikeme). We also are exploring partnerships with health care providers and data stores for getting additional data.