Digital health startup Buoy launches AI-powered, symptom-checking chatbot

It has become an undeniable fact of life that people are going to Google their health symptoms. However, as most physicians are reminded every day by patients who come to the hospital or office armed with their smartphones or printouts of their search results, the internet often leads people to draw erroneous or even harmful conclusions about their health. Fed up with the confusion and misinformation of patients he was encountering as a third-year medical resident in 2014, Harvard Medical School student Andrew Le thought there had to be a better way. Over the past three years, Le and his colleague Eddie Reyes worked with a team at the Innovation Laboratory at Harvard to develop a digital health tool that would function as a health-specific search engine while also giving patients pointers and compassion along the way. "Right now, the status quo is Googling symptoms and getting scared. That is the front door of healthcare," Le told MobiHealthNews in an interview.