The prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge Award for Patient Health Education was awarded to AI health startup Buoy Health during September’s Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, California. Buoy Health’s AI assistant provides help and information for patients the moment they become ill, and enabling them to start their care the correct way.
The award culminates a competition of health-focused technologies that best incorporate AI as part of their model. The year-long contest drew 250 competitors across multiple rounds of evaluation. In the final round of pitching, the competition’s judges found Buoy Health’s technology held the most creativity, scalability, impact, design intuitiveness, and potential for adoption.
“Buoy was designed using real world data points based on trusted medical literature and guides patients to care by asking questions, just like a real doctor would,” said Buoy Health CEO, Dr. Andrew Le. “After a consumer answers questions for 2 to 3 minutes, we narrow the possible diagnoses and, through our employer, payer, and provider partners, show exactly what services exist for that particular ailment.”
The winning team is comprised of doctors, software engineers, and product designers from the Harvard Innovation Laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a direct response to the difficulty of self-diagnosing symptoms online. Thanks to a strategic partnership with CVS Health and a learning partnership with Boston’s Children’s Hospital, their technology helps real patients with accurate assessments of what’s wrong and how to get better.
