Roon, a physician-only social network, is collaborating with the American Heart Association to integrate its medical research onto the platform to bridge published medical literature with real-time peer discussion.
Roon officially launched in late April as an AI native social platform for physicians to connect, debate and share clinical knowledge. Founded by Rohan Ramakrishna, M.D., a neurosurgeon and two Pinterest executives, Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan, the startup describes itself as a physicians-only knowledge network and "digital doctor’s lounge" that creates a space for doctors to share their collective wisdom.
The American Heart Association, founded in 1924, has grown into the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. The organization funds cutting-edge medical research, drives public health policies and creates educational programs to foster longer, healthier lives.
The collaboration with Roon makes the American Heart Association's research social, noted Ramakrishna, co-founder and president of Roon. It provides a forum for physicians to discuss and engage with AHA's research, he said.
The American Heart Association publishes a portfolio of 14 peer-reviewed scientific journals dedicated to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease research.
Physicians are already overwhelmed by the pace of modern clinical practice, making it increasingly difficult to keep up with new medical literature, let alone interpret it in context.
"We all have infinite amounts of information coming at us but it's really hard to get the time to dive in and really learn what a new research study means and then being able to contextualize it and place the research in context of what research came before and how this research is going to affect practice," Ramakrishna told Fierce Healthcare. "Being able to do this in a community platform with the opinion leaders across medicine allows these insights to be harvested from physicians all over the country and eventually the world."
More than 80% of physicians now use AI professionally, including for medical research, and while that's democratized access to information, it's also changed how research gets consumed, Roon executives assert. Findings arrive as AI-generated summaries and bullet points, but the nuance and context that make them clinically meaningful, or not, can be lost, according to the executives.
A recent Nature Medicine study claims that general-purpose frontier models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude outperform specialized clinical tools like OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI on medical benchmarks.
"I think the big takeaway is that they're all increasingly similar and increasingly good at being able to summarize and synthesize the published evidence, but what none of them have is the reasoning layer or the different interpretation and that's the part that Roon is building and is differentiated and something you can't do anywhere else," Ramakrishna said, noting that Roon is building the "interpretation layer."
Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) unveiled a collaboration with Roon, making it the first official medical journal on the Roon physician intelligence network. Adding medical journals to the platform marks a major step toward making medical knowledge more social, accessible and actionable for physicians, Roon executives noted. It equips the platform and the doctors using it with resources to analyze research, discuss it with colleagues, ask questions and debate implications, executives said.
Roon has been live since November and now has "a few thousand" physician users on the platform. Physicians using it span cardiology, OBGYN, nephrology, pulmonary/critical care, emergency medicine, internal medicine/hospitalist medicine, oncology and infectious disease, according to the company.
Roon members include leading physicians Mandy Cohen, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Deb Houry, nationally recognized physician and public health leader and Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Modern medicine allows us to do more for our patients, but corporate pressures and the electronic health record have made practice less intimate. Roon has filled the void, becoming healthcare's digital watercooler: a space for expert curation and genuine collegial exchange," Wachter said in a statement.
There are several established online networks for healthcare professionals such as Doximity, Sermo and Figure 1, along with general social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. There also is a newer social media platform run by the social media personality Dr. Glaucomflecken.
Ramakrishna and Bhaskaran said they started Roon because they saw a void of physician-centric online spaces that provide a high-trust environment for discussion, collaboration, debate and engagement.
"We initially launched on the patient side. We were building patient education and guidance for people navigating heart conditions, and we had thousands of physicians who came along the journey with us on the patient side. The number one feedback we heard over and over again was, 'Hey, you're building this thing for patients, but I don't have a place for myself to collaborate, to connect in a safe place'," Bhaskaran, co-founder and CEO, told Fierce Healthcare back in May shortly after Roon officially launched.
"So much of physician communities are now happening in WhatsApp group chats, but it's extremely fragmented. There's like thousands of small OB group chats," he noted.
Physicians told the founders that other network platforms were built pre-AI, operated more like clinical decision support or were larger, more general social media platforms.
"The idea of a physician community where doctors could just be themselves in a safe space was just a big white space, and so we decided to just take a big stab at that. Many of the early MedTwitter people came to the platform, and it's become a little bit of a best-kept secret in medicine right now where leaders in medicine are very excited to be here and they have conversations that they wouldn't have in an open forum like LinkedIn or Twitter," he added.
Bhaskaran asserts there are lessons to be learned from building a platform like Pinterest and how that translates to a healthcare community. "People at Pinterest were obsessed with this more pristine, safe place on the internet that was not engagement driven. What we're trying to infuse is just good design, clean UX," he noted. "Pinterest is all about collective wisdom. We think of Roon as a collective intelligence platform where the wisdom of many is what we're building for."
He added, "I think the big thing we learned at Pinterest is actually vertical networks matter. We are the vertical network for a vertical that has lots of unique needs."
The platform is free for physicians and features sponsored content. Roon also has a growing network of founding physicians who have helped "co-build" the platform. Many of these founding physicians were offered equity in the company.
Currently, Roon is available exclusively to physicians and when asked about opening up the platform to other clinicians or healthcare professionals, Bhaskaran said, "for the next year" Roon is focused on physicians.
"We hear two things. On one hand, I think doctors really love that it is just physicians for physicians. That said, the number one request we've had is to open it up to people with Ph.Ds. and others from nurses to APPs (advanced practice providers)," he said, noting that Roon's broader goal is to be a "network for health."