Background
DISEASE, RARE DISEASES
Diagnostic accuracy is one of the major cornerstones of appropriate and successful medical decision-making [CDSSs are software which are meant to offer impersonal support in medical decision-making in order to facilitate diagnostic processes [As digitised CDSSs seem to be of major relevance in the nearer future we have been wondering whether the use of CDSSs also were an asset for medical students when they develop their diagnostic decision-making skills and the process related to diagnostic decision-making. As such, CDSSs were to be viewed as an educational tool that offer medical students additional avenues towards medical decision-making [To the best of our knowledge our study is the first one to explore the usefulness of CDSSs in medical education with regards to the influence of a CDSS on students’ diagnostic accuracy and their trust in their own diagnoses as outcomes of their decision-making process. Most studies using supporting devices for medical decision-making almost exclusively focus on rare diseases or challenging if not unusual cases [We expected students to solve the case with the typical presentation of a common disease with more diagnostic accuracy than the case with the atypical presentation, irrespective of whether they used conventional methods as defined above or a CDSS. Our primary hypothesis was that diagnoses using conventional methods were on average more accurate than diagnoses with a CDSS as students were still unfamiliar with the CDSSs and their approach to use this software appropriately. Further, we hypothesised that students would have greater trust in their own diagnostic accuracy when relying on CDSS as they lack the personal experience in medical decision-making in this early phase of their career as future doctors.