A neurosurgeon and two former Pinterest executives walk into a bar and… No, this isn’t the premise for a joke. Rohan Ramakrishna joined forces with Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan and founded Roon, a new social network exclusively for doctors. According to Medcity, the platform aims to give voice to the “collective wisdom” of physicians, moving away from traditional informal exchanges and fragmented online communities.
Roon launched on the last day of April. The free platform was founded by Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan, two former Pinterest leaders, respectively CEO and CTO, and neurosurgeon Rohan Ramakrishna, president of the startup.
Ramakrishna explains that Roon was designed and created to address a growing gap in the medical community: the lack of a suitable online space to connect, discuss, and share clinical knowledge.
The startup’s president says there’s room for AI tools like Anothropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but the focus is on summarizing published literature. Roon wants to capture the “collective wisdom” of physicians, including their unique judgment and case-based experience, says Ramakrishna.
Roon is committed to combining two elements: AI-driven research synthesis and structured peer-to-peer discussion, mirroring real-world medical events such as case conferences and scientific article reading clubs.
Ramakrishna states that “ultimately, what we are is an infrastructure for the best medical conversations. We want to provide that infrastructure to truly unlock the wisdom, experience, nuances, and judgment that are trapped in the minds of physicians. There’s a lot in medicine and healthcare that isn’t published, that isn’t on the web because it kind of only exists in the brains of physicians.”
Roon was created to reveal and expand the tacit knowledge of informal exchanges, such as group chats among doctors, quick consultations, or conversations during meetings, largely inaccessible outside of small circles.
This is not the first proposed social network for doctors. In the United States, the Doximity social network was launched in 2010; in Brazil, Ology was launched in 2013; and in Portugal, TonicApp was founded in 2016 and launched in 2017.
Ramakrishna argues that his startup was primarily designed for in-depth clinical discussions or community building. “Nobody uses Doximity as a space to build communities among doctors. That’s not a use anyone imagines for Doximity. They have their clinical decision support tool, their anonymous marker, voting during the U.S. News & World Report hospital rankings—those are the three main interactions doctors are familiar with.”
The ambition of the platform’s creators is for it to become the central infrastructure for meaningful medical communication, promoting clinical discussion but expanding to broader conversations among physicians—addressing ethics, policies, and personal values.
Ramakrishna wants the company to place scientific articles at the center of discussions, rather than simply summarizing them.
The platform’s president explains that “the focus at this stage is really to create something that is loved by doctors worldwide,” which is why it’s free. However, Ramakrishna admits that the company may seek revenue in the future through sponsorships, educational partnerships, and marketplaces.
Overall, the company’s goal is to transform fragmented conversations among physicians into a centralized and scalable source of medical knowledge and insights.
