Yahoo Finance New app claims to accurately diagnose any medical condition
The internet is an insane place to get medical information. One minute you’re looking up whether your cough is from a cold or allergies, and the next you’re convinced you have stage 12 hyper-cancer, typhoid fever and somehow, beyond all reason, have contracted a species of wolf parasite that’s been extinct for 5,000 years.
Andrew Le, founder and CEO of Buoy, hopes to change that. A fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, Le started the company to educate people searching for medical information without scaring them.
To do that, Le and his two co-founders created the Buoy app. Available Wednesday for iOS, the free app uses a bot that helps give you a better understanding of what’s bothering you, without terrifying you at the same time.
You start by entering some basic information like your age, gender and where you live. Next, you tell Buoy what’s bothering you, whether that’s a runny nose or busted finger. The app will then either begin peppering you with questions to pinpoint the potential cause of your discomfort, or, in the case of a broken bone or serious medical issue, tell you to go directly to the hospital.
Le said he was inspired to create the service after his aunt died of cancer. As he explains it, his aunt’s cancer might have been treatable if the disease had been caught sooner. Unfortunately, when she called Le with her symptoms and he told her to get checked out, the disease had progressed too far.
The doctor is in
So what sets Buoy apart from something like WebMD (WBMD) or Mayo Clinic’s symptom checkers? Machine learning. Le says the app can look at the information you send it — the symptoms of a sinus infection, for example — and compare them against 1,600 potential diagnoses developed using data from 18,000 clinical papers encompassing observations of 5 million patients.
Buoy doesn’t just ballpark its questions, either. In one example, Le explained how the app asked one tester in a region with a lot of pig farms if he had been around pigs recently to help it rule out whether he had contracted swine flu.
When the app thinks it has reached a diagnosis, it will provide you with a list of your potential ailments ranging from the most to least likely, and explanations as to why it came to those conclusions.
According to Le, an internal study conducted at an urgent care facility comparing Buoy’s diagnoses with those of the center’s doctors found the app to be 90.9% accurate.
I ran through a series of test examples with Buoy’s website to see how well it worked and was surprised at its accuracy. Not only did it diagnose a broken hand based on my recollection of the sensations I felt after breaking my own, but it also figured out I had sinusitis.
To be sure, Buoy isn’t a doctor. The company has built safeguards into the app that tell you to get to an emergency room immediately if you feel things like a crushing pain in your chest, which could mean you’re having a heart attack.
Eventually, Le said, Buoy will be able to pull in information about hospitals and doctors in your area that accept your insurance and provide you with links to ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft to get you there.
Now instead of panicking about that wolf parasite, you can get back to panicking about other things. Like how you’ll pay for your old medical bills.
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Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
