A new social media platform exclusively for doctors launched this week. The free platform, called Therewas founded by Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan, two former Pinterest executives who serve as CEO and CTO respectively, as well as neurosurgeon Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna, who serves as president of the startup.
The platform is designed to fill a growing gap within the physician community: the lack of appropriate online space to connect, debate and share clinical knowledge, said Dr. Ramakrishna.
Although AI tools like Anothropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT can do a good job of summarizing published literature, they lack the “collective wisdom” of doctors, including their unique judgment and case-based experience, he explained.
According to him, Roon combines two elements. The first is the synthesis of AI-based research, and the second is a structured peer-to-peer discussion that reflects real-world medical events like case conferences and journal clubs.
“Ultimately, what we are is an infrastructure for the best medical conversations. We want to provide that infrastructure to really unlock the wisdom, experience, nuance and judgment that is trapped in doctors’ heads. There is so much medicine and health that is not published, that is not on the web because it simply exists in doctors’ brains,” Dr. Ramakrishna said.
He said informal exchanges such as group chats with doctors, curbside consultations or discussions at meetings can be very useful, but are largely inaccessible beyond small circles. Roon is designed to surface and scale this tacit knowledge.
But it’s not like this platform is the first online forum where doctors have to interact with each other. Doximity launched as a social network for doctors in 2010, and doctors have created discussion communities on mainstream platforms like Twitter (or X, if you call it that) and TikTok.
Dr. Ramakrishna believes that Roon is different from these platforms because they are not primarily designed for in-depth clinical discourse or community building.
“No one is using Doximity as a place to build community among doctors. That’s not a use case that anyone would think of Doximity for. They have their clinical decision support tool, their anonymous dialer, voting on US News and World Report. [hospital rankings] – these are the three main interactions that doctors are most aware of,” he noted.
Roon, meanwhile, seeks to become the basic infrastructure for meaningful medical communication, Dr. Ramakrishna said.
Beyond clinical discussions, he sees Roon expanding into broader conversations with doctors – ones that address ethics, policies and personal values. He added that one of the company’s main missions is to “make research social” by centering journal articles in the discussion rather than simply summarizing them.
Regarding the startup’s business model, Dr. Ramakrishna said that “its goal at this point is to really create something that is loved by doctors around the world.” In the future, he said the company could potentially monetize through sponsorships, educational partnerships and marketplaces.
Overall, the company’s goal is to transform fragmented conversations between doctors into a centralized, scalable source of medical knowledge and information.
Photo: Half Point Images, Getty Images
