Medical College of Wisconsin Archives - Milwaukee Community Journal

AI replaces online guessing and searching with real-time information and education

A new digital health tool called Buoy now available on froedtert.com simplifies online searching for health information.
Unlike typical health symptom checkers, the Buoy tool is interactive and it’s personal. A user enters symptoms; Buoy asks questions, waits for that person’s responses in real time, and then provides a personalized analysis and recommends how to best treat the symptoms and possible care options.
“Buoy is an educational and informational tool. It’s not meant as a substitute for professional medical advice. It’s meant to connect people more quickly with the right medical care at the right time,” said Mike Anderes, Chief Innovation & Digital Officer for Froedtert Health, and President of Inception Health. “With the wealth of health information available on the Internet, we want people to have the most credible and helpful tools available.”
Buoy was created by a team of doctors and computer scientists. Working closely with Harvard’s Innovation Laboratory, the team mapped out different symptoms and how people describe them in searches to create the tool.
“Buoy’s algorithm really listens and then recalculates your inputs in real time. This helps serve up questions that will more quickly and more accurately identify what’s wrong, so you can get on the right path to getting better,” said Andrew Le, CEO and co-founder of Buoy.
Because Buoy utilizes artificial intelligence, it will improve as more people use it. Its style of interview questions is derived from research on patient-computer dialogue spanning 50 years.
Buoy is the latest application Froedtert & MCW health network has introduced with the goal of improving an individual’s ability to navigate health care on their terms and be guided to the most appropriate care. Froedtert Health’s innovation accelerator, called Inception Health, researched a host of tools and selected the Buoy virtual triage tool for its personal, intuitive user experience.

Medical College Professor and Chair, Dr. Stephen Hargarten

In the wake of the latest mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, Medical College of Wisconsin [1]professor Dr. Stephen Hargarten has penned a letter urging the medical community to conduct more scientific research to uncover the causes of gun violence.

“We must first recognize gun violence as a public health issue,” he writes. “In order to truly understand and attack the issue, we must rigorously research this at the highest level.”

As Director at the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Hargarten considers gun violence to be a form of “biopsychosocial disease,” something that should be studied scientifically rather than overlooked as political enigma. It is biologic [2] in that release of kinetic energy from the bullet tearing through the victims’ bodies, and psychosocial in how it greatly impacts the lives of the survivors who witness them.

Hargarten’s past research has reflected an intersection of injury and violence prevention. He has also contributed to health policy addressing the burden of biosocial diseases. In fact, Hargarten’s work in linking data systems for understanding violent deaths informed the development of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Violent Death Reporting System [3].

Firearms kill more than 30,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC. Yet, scientific research into the causes of gun violence is lacking. This is partially due to policy barriers, such as the Dickey Amendment [4], but Hargarten says there is also a general lack of collaboration.

Whether shootings are increasing because of concealed carry laws, overlooked mental health or other societal factors, wielding science can give medical researchers the power to uncover some of those answers — and use those findings to save lives, Hargarten says.

“We need to continue to understand this biopsychosocial disease burden by keeping our focus on the science,” says Hargarten. “By asking the tough questions, rigorously testing hypotheses, and objectively disseminating our findings so that other can learn, so that we can continue to learn, and so we can start to make a difference.”

“WE ARE NOT HELPLESS,” he adds.