Preventable medical error leads to an estimated 200,000 deaths per year in the US, and many of these deaths are caused by mistaken diagnoses. Clearly, making it easier for doctors to avoid errors should be a priority.

One promising avenue could be collective decision-making: pooling the diagnoses of various doctors and using their joint wisdom to hit on the most likely answer. According to a paper in this week’s PNAS, though, this method is only likely to work if all the doctors in the group have the same level of skill.

Obviously, ethics committees are unlikely to allow a team of researchers to toy with patients’ potentially life-or-death diagnoses. So in order to figure out whether collective decision-making would help with the problem, the team combined real-world data with a computer simulation.