Needs improvement – IDdx: Infectious Disease Queries Review

While this app contains very good information, it is not as useful as it could be due to the limitations of the search functionality. Search results are put in alphabetical order. While this may not sound like a problem, there are usually quite a few search results. Since there is no ranking, extremely uncommon diseases whose symptoms only vaguely match the search criteria may be put at the top of the list, burying the useful information. That makes it very difficult to form a differential diagnosis based on the search results. The creators of this software list on their site that their competitor (which is prohibitively costly) has a Bayesian algorithm to rank search results based on prevalence of the disease and how frequently the symptoms searched for appear in that particular disease. Such a function would make the software incredibly useful for forming a differential diagnosis. Even ranking solely on prevalence of the disease would improve the functionality greatly. A good app, but I hope to see great improvement in the future.
Review by Michael Light on IDdx: Infectious Disease Queries.