Microsoft says its new AI system, the Diagnostic Orchestrator, can diagnose medical conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, are based on tests that pitted the tool against physicians on cases drawn from medical reports and emergency department data, The Verge reported.
The system runs on OpenAI's GPT-5 and works like a panel of medical experts: several AI agents reason through symptoms and patient histories, decide which tests to order, and reach a diagnosis. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told The Verge that healthcare AI "is finally here" and predicted the company would build something "indistinguishable from human performance" within a couple of years.
Diagnostic Orchestrator study results
The headline numbers are striking. On cases taken from hundreds of reports published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Microsoft's system reached around 83 percent diagnostic accuracy. Generalist physicians using references scored roughly 36 percent, and those working without them managed about 22 percent.
On emergency department cases from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Diagnostic Orchestrator scored 80 percent accuracy against an average of 47 percent for human physicians. The AI also tended to reach its diagnoses at a lower estimated cost than its human counterparts, the researchers said.
- New England Journal of Medicine cases: about 83% accuracy for the AI vs roughly 36% for doctors with references and 22% without
- Emergency department cases from Beth Israel Deaconess: 80% for the AI vs an average of 47% for physicians
- The system also produced diagnoses at a lower estimated cost than human doctors
