Emulating cognitive diagnostic skills without clinical experience: a report of medical students using Quick Medical Reference and Iliad in the diagnosis of difficult clinical cases.

Diagnosing complex internal medicine cases has traditionally been the domain and hallmark of clinical expertise. However, the creation of a differential diagnosis list using abstracted case information can be seen as a database query function and has been emulated by software such as QMR and Iliad. To test this premise, twenty two sophomore medical students were taught how to abstract clinical data, and use QMR and Iliad to diagnose complex clinical cases from the New England Journal of Medicine. Half of the students were able to provide correct diagnoses within a list of ten. These preliminary results supports a notion that clinical diagnosis may be a skill independent of clinical experience.