Doctors have long worked together to manage uncertainty through bedside rounds, informal and formal consultations, conferences such as grand rounds, and committees like tumor boards. In each, physicians combine partial perspectives when no single clinician can see the whole picture.
That is changing. Three developments—advances in the science of collective intelligence, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, and the growth of large clinician networks—are making it possible to move beyond small, local groups toward larger, faster, and more diverse networks of clinical judgment.
Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania, author of the upcoming book Goodthink, focuses instead on network structure. His group has shown that egalitarian information-exchange networks—where participants iteratively revise their independent judgments after seeing anonymized peer responses—promote individual learning and improve collective accuracy, reducing diagnostic errors and care disparities.