A new social media platform exclusively for doctors launched this week. The free platform, called Roon, was founded by Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan, two former Pinterest leaders who serve as CEO and chief technology officer, respectively, as well as neurosurgeon Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna, who serves as the startup’s president.
The platform is designed to address a growing gap in the physician community — its lack of a suitable space online to connect, debate and share clinical knowledge, Dr. Ramakrishna said.
While AI tools like Anothropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT can do a good job of summarizing published literature, they miss the “collective wisdom” of physicians, including their unique judgement and case-based experience, he explained.
In his view, Roon combines two elements. The first is the AI-powered synthesis of research, and the second is structured peer-to-peer discussion that mirrors real-world medical events like case conferences and journal clubs.
“Ultimately, what we are is infrastructure for the very best medical conversations. We want to provide that infrastructure to really unlock the wisdom and experience and nuance and judgment that is trapped in physicians’ heads. There’s so much of medicine and health that’s unpublished, that’s not on the web because it kind of just exists in physicians’ brains,” Dr. Ramakrishna declared.
He said that informal exchanges such as physician group chats, curbside consults or chatter during meetings can be highly valuable, but it’s largely inaccessible beyond small circles. Roon is built to surface and scale that tacit knowledge.
But it’s not like this platform is the first online forum doctors have ever had to interact with one another. Doximity launched as a social network for physicians in 2010, and doctors have carved out communities for discussion on mainstream platforms like Twitter (or X, if you call it that) and TikTok.
Dr. Ramakrishna believes Roon is different from these platforms because they are not primarily designed for deep clinical discourse or community building.
“No one uses Doximity as a place for community building amongst physicians. That’s not a use case that anyone thinks of Doximity for. They have their clinical decision support tool, their anonymous dialer, the voting during U.S. News and World Report [hospital rankings] — those are the main three interactions that doctors are most aware of,” he remarked.
Roon, on the other hand, is seeking to become the core infrastructure for meaningful medical communication, Dr. Ramakrishna stated.
Beyond clinical discussion, he sees Roon expanding into broader physician conversations — ones tackling ethics, policy and personal values. He added that one of the company’s main missions is to “make research social” by centering journal articles in discussion rather than just summarizing them.
As for the startup’s business model, Dr. Ramakrishna said its “focus at this stage is to really make something beloved for doctors across the world.” In the future, he said the company could eventually monetize via sponsorships, education partnerships and marketplaces.
Overall, the company’s goal is to turn fragmented physician conversations into a centralized, scalable source of medical knowledge and insight.
Photo: Halfpoint Images, Getty Images
