By Robert Booth
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 18:00:00
From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency doctors have long been beloved heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up your coat?
A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperform human doctors at high-pressure emergency triage and provide more accurate diagnoses in the potentially vital moments when people are first admitted to hospital.
The results were described by independent experts as “a real advance” in the clinical reasoning of AIs and were part of studies testing the responses of hundreds of doctors compared to an AI.
The authors said the results, published in the journal Science, showed that large language models (LLMs) “have eclipsed most measures of clinical reasoning.”
One experiment focused on 76 patients arriving at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. An AI and two human doctors were each presented with the same standard electronic health record to read – typically including vital…
