Comments on post “Buoy Health”
Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
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
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Chris Schwartze
@chrisschwartze · Marketing Manager, Heroic Academy
Baymax, is that you 😱
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BIn Bin
@tom1077
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.
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Prashant Sharma
@nitprashant
What a brilliant product, thank you for making this.
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Calum Webb
@calum_webb
How does this compare in accuracy to WebMD's app? I know it's a different format with it being a chatbot, but aside from that how does it differ?
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Mohammed Taha
@taha_tweets · Startup Enthusiast | Risk Romancer
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
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George Nikolic
@georgenikolic · Lead Marketing Specialist @ XWIKI
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.
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Sanketh Beerabbi
@sankethbe · Health Tech Entrepreneur
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.
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Cam Burley
@codecamcode
This is really dope! Not a ton of chatbots I walk away from feeling like that
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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
@codecamcode Thanks Cam!
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Cam Burley
@codecamcode
@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!
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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
@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.
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Vatsal Bajpai
@vatsal__bajpai
Tested with someone having symptoms and it accurately predicted " Sciatica" as the matched issue. The intelligence of product is remarkable. Great work!
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Chris A
@plurnt · Business student & tech enthusiast
Used this and was impressed by how thorough all the questions were. Great product!
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Jesper Hessius
@hsus · MD & Front end dev @ Pillerkollen
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?
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jen wong
@simplyjenwong · Lead product designer at @BuoyHealth
@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.
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Jaxon Stevens
@jaxonkstevens · OutBully
Love this idea! I was looking for something like this before but could never find any real good resource online. Excited to try it out!
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Pratik Khandagale
@allpratik · Co-Founder, DreamLap
@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! :)
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jen wong
@simplyjenwong · Lead product designer at @BuoyHealth
@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 :)
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Pratik Khandagale
@allpratik · Co-Founder, DreamLap
@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!
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jen wong
@simplyjenwong · Lead product designer at @BuoyHealth
@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.
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Rick Chen
@rick_chen1 · making people lazy at instantaccess.io
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. 🏅
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Onutz Verde
@utestme · ICT Marketing Manager
Very nice UI, congrats! I've just played a couple of minutes ago with ADA. What is different from it?
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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
@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.
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Michael Goldstrom
@goldstrom
This is superb. The clarity of information and the way it's presented is just superbly done.
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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
@goldstrom Thanks so much, Michael. That's very kind of you. We are working really hard to present information in a way that's similar to how doctors verbally give you clarity and empathy. We hope we can help you or your loved one the next time you're sick.
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Warren Sturt
@warrenalfred · Managing Director at R25G.com
@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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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
@warrenalfred Thank you! Yes, we have an API that can be integrated into any technical solution by a hospital, insurer, etc.
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Martin Knight
@mknight_design · Digital Designer
Great work folks! Very seedless and easy to use, well designed too. I tried the web version as the app isn't yet released in the Swedish App Store - will the app eventually become available in this region too?
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Andrey Zinoviev
@andrey_zinoviev · Co-founder and COO at Visabot
Hey guys! Nice idea! How to try the bot? In Facebook messenger?
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Andrew Le
@andrew_q_le · CEO/Co-Founder, Buoy Health
Hi @andrey_zinoviev! You can check us out online at www.buoyhealth.com or on the app store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...
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