Hi everyone! Thanks so much for the feedback and the kind words. My name is Andrew, I'm the CEO/Co-Founder of Buoy, and our mission is to build technology with heart for the health of every person in the world. We created Buoy, an artificial intelligence tool meant to replicate an exchange you might have with your favorite doctor, by teaching it with real data from 18,000 clinical papers covering 5M patients. What does this mean for you?
1) @calum_webb - As opposed to WebMD and similar 1.0 symptom checkers that use decision trees (think of a choose-your-own adventure novel where everyone gets diagnosed with cancer), Buoy is dynamically picking 1 of 30,000 possible questions to ask you based on which one, from a statistical perspective, is going to reduce the uncertainty of what you have the most. This happens for 2-3 minutes before we show you what diagnoses (max 3) are possible and what to do next.
2) We've run 3 studies thus far. First, we ran a quality control study in an urgent care center where 500 patients used Buoy in the waiting room and then saw their doctor. We compared the doctor's diagnosis with our own. We agreed with them 90.9% of the time. In a study from the British Medical Journal last year, symptom checkers were found to be 34% accurate, on average. In 2nd study, we ran 100 cases of cough written by physicians across 33 different diagnoses through Buoy, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Isabel, and Healthline, our main competitors in the US. We were diagnostically accurate 92% of the time and had a triage accuracy (telling you the right place to go) of 98%. The others fared at: 56% (WebMD), 38% (Mayo), 28% (Isabel), and 53% (Healthline).
3) @georgenikolic - I appreciate what you're saying. To unpack a few things here, we do everything we can to catch urgent, life-threatening diseases. Any symptom with characteristics that may be very urgent are immediately triaged to the emergency room. For example, for anyone with chest pain that radiates to the back, Buoy immediately stops asking questions and explains the urgent need to have that symptom checked out. To your larger point about checking symptoms online being unsafe, we completely agree. Unfortunately, there are just not enough doctors in America (and the world) for the number of people that we have. Thus, everyone (72% of Americans) are turning to search engines for help. My own family suffered the consequences of doing that. Thus, we've taken on this responsibility so that you and your loved ones can get a real, statistical understanding of what might be going on and what to do next. We're not here to replace doctors, we're here to replace the danger of Dr. Google.
4) @taha_tweets - Thanks so much for the feedback. Our search bar is arguably the most difficult part of our product. We're trying to improve it every day, and I appreciate you giving us further affirmation that more resources should be headed that way.
5) @tom1077, @nitprashant, @Vatsal__bajpai, and @sankethbe, thank you so much for your kind words. We wake up every morning to try and help people, and it's so gratifying to read your comments. We're truly grateful, and we hope we can be of service to you the next time you're having a bad day.
Warmly,
Andrew
@andrew_q_le
Hello doctor
Buoy health is a great idea. And I want to ask you about an “ employee” icon in the homepage of this website, what’s its purpose and how can buoy benefit employers?
@andrew_q_le brilliantly used a web UI to reduce friction. No real convention around bots yet. Nice way to ingratiate yourself into world of avg user. Will watch you guys continue to grow!
@codecamcode Thanks so much, Cam! I'm not going to take any credit for that UI. Shout out to our sick team @simplyjenwong, @jimmy_mills, @j4cobj (amongst others not on PH) for creating that.
Just letting you guys know this thing is amazing. Thank you for creating it. Someone who has been sick all my life it's fun seeing some correct and very close predictions.
Really interesting product, as a doctor I hope that products like this can help the health care sector use its limited resources more efficiently, for this to help the health care in my mind you'd need tight integration / collaboration with a provider so for example a patient looking for help will be triaged, can book a time slot and the exchange is available to the doctor ahead of time maybe the doctor could even order lab tests or radiology before even seeing the patient. Possibilities are huge, any plans for this?
@hsus Thanks Jesper! You have absolutely the right idea here. Our hope isn't to replace doctors, but route patients to the most appropriate care using Buoy as a first step in their healthcare journey.
We currently have some basic integration with providers at the end of the interview, but this is definitely something we're working to build out more.
smooth experience. tested with the actual symptoms I've got :P and results were close enough. AI best used. Many keywords aren't recognized by the bot, which is perhaps cause of basic data availability, as the user keywords emerge, results would be more precise and accurate. Overall - Cool stuff. Bravo makers @Andrew_q_le , @simplyjenwong , @jimmy_mills
Amazing concept but still quite a bit of work I'm afraid :-)
I gave it a path to my mild health concern and it went from 1703 considerations down to 2 and then is stuck... with a blank box - above is says 2 considerations left and the phrase:
If you'd like to do it again, you can start over... and a blue bar that goes back and forth forever...
And since there is no onsite Intercom/Chat etc can't reach out to anyone :/
Bot and AI technology is great and evolving but no replacement for a human contact just yet.. not until you have 100s of thousands to millions of interviews in the system...
@exlemor Hi Emmanuel! Thanks so much for giving us a try, and we really appreciate your feedback. Sorry to hear you had a less than optimal experience! Usually we have an Intercom integration to help in situations like yours, so we'll dig in to see why that wasn't the case. There's certainly a lot of work left for us to do, and hearing from people like you is what will help us constantly improve—so thank you!
Definitely hear you on bots and AI not being a replacement for human contact yet! As @andrew_q_le said, we're not here to replace doctors, we're here to replace the danger of Dr. Google :)
@exlemor Thanks for your feedback! We looked into what happened, and our CTO had reset the server to push out a new piece of code exactly during your visit. We are working on timing our updates during less high-traffic hours. Forgive us, we've never seen this amazing amount of traffic before.
How is this product valuable for its users? I think it's a very big responsability to create such an app. I'm also totally against checking the symptoms online. This is what doctors are for. For example, an user who requires immediate medical attention, can be deceived by a false medical dyagnosis and things can get ugly for delaying proper medical care.
Tested with someone having symptoms and it accurately predicted " Sciatica" as the matched issue. The intelligence of product is remarkable. Great work!
Great chatbot! Asks the right questions, accurately diagnoses most symptoms and gives valid, non-alarming suggestions. One of the very few symptom checkers that actually works the way it's supposed to! But there were a few combinations of symptoms where it asked a large number of questions and some needlessly. You'll need quite a bit of patience to answer them, especially when you're ill. There has to be some trade-off between accuracy and convenience like a real doctor's intuition. Overall, I'm highly impressed and believe its a great step into the future of digital healthcare.
I checked out the web app and was answering Buoy as if I had a sinus headache. It matched me with 7 potential suspects, and 1 likely match of a sinus headache! Was impressed with the whole experience, from the questions to the animations.
@andrew_q_le - One thing that I wish were improved is the recommended care options. Buoy said there's nothing to worry about and that these headaches are normal.
@kunalslab Thanks Kunal for checking us out, and for your valuable feedback regarding care options. We're absolutely hoping to build this out further in coming months.
The challenge here is finding the balance between providing several options and letting you choose which feels most appropriate—which can be confusing bc suggestions might conflict—or only providing one suggestion—which may be too serious or not serious enough. We'd also love to build in a more robust treatment section.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Stay tuned!
@andrew_q_le Totally loved this bot! Congratulations! But it's a huge responsibility as well. The problem I faced during bot conversation like the questions "Had your ever been diagnosed with X disease/condition? "
Now this 'X' is medical term which I haven't heard of... So, I had to switch to google it for couple of times and then answer it. It would be better if you can show more information on "X" right there. It could be a picture of that symptom or some text about it. I know you post some pictures as well...it was very good to see that level of details.
Anyways, apart from this ..accuracy was simply superb. I hope this gets real big and enable thousands of patients to safeguard themselves in preventing some dangerous diseases early on! :)
@allpratik Thanks Pratik for sharing your thoughts. Totally hear you on the inconvenience of having to look up medical terms on Google! We certainly would love for the experience to be as streamlined as possible. Love the idea you proposed and am adding it to our list of updates to make. Thank you again for bringing this up. Truly appreciate it and we hope you'll continue to use Buoy :)
@simplyjenwong Ohh of course! In fact I am referring this to all my dear ones but it is not widely published yet, it seems! Like Apple's US App store only!
I mentioned about that inconvenience from engagement point of view. Internet is becoming a whole big rabbit hole...and it is very easy for users to get distracted. It is always better to keep users on the same screen while providing the value/service.
Hope you will release this bot soon worldwide! Also, it will be good if you can share your tech stack somewhere. I would love to go through it. Best of luck for the future!
@allpratik Love that you're spreading the word about us! We are currently only available on the US Apple app store, but our web app (www.buoyhealth.com) is accessible worldwide.
@utestme Thanks, Onutz! We are big fans of ADA. As I mentioned below about Your.MD, we all have different approaches (I'm assuming, I don't know ADA's underlying algorithm), so we're going to withhold commenting on them. I hope one of us is successful, however, because the world needs a better source to turn to.
Although it didn't recognise my rare condition when I tried, I still think this could evolve into something huge in the future and help millions of ppl. U should win a metal for this. 🏅
@andrew_q_le@simplyjenwong awesome product. UI/UX is very clean. Any plans to package this into an API and offer to hospitals, groups, MSOs, etc to white label?
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