Roon, a social network exclusively for doctors, is working with the American Heart Association to integrate its medical research into its platform, bridging published medical literature with real-time peer-to-peer discussions.
Roon was officially launched in late April as an AI-native social platform for physicians to connect, discuss, and share clinical knowledge. The startup, founded by neurosurgeon Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna and Pinterest executives Vikram Bhaskaran and Arun Ranganathan, describes itself as a knowledge network specifically for doctors and a “digital doctor’s lounge” that creates a space for doctors to share collective knowledge.
Founded in 1924, the American Heart Association has grown to become the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. The organization funds cutting-edge medical research, advances public health policy, and creates educational programs to promote longer, healthier lives.
Ramakrishna, Roon’s chairman, notes that the collaboration with Roon has made the American Heart Association’s research more social. It provides a forum for physicians to discuss and engage with AHA 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 speed of modern clinical practice and are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with new medical literature, much less interpret it in context.
“We all receive an endless amount of information, but it’s very difficult to find the time to actually learn what a new research study means and be able to contextualize it and place it within the context of the research that has been done before and how this research might impact healthcare,” Ramakrishna told Fierce Healthcare. “We can do this on a community platform with thought leaders in the medical community, so we can get these insights from physicians across the country and ultimately around the world.”
More than 80% of doctors are now using AI for professional purposes such as medical research, and while access to information has been democratized, the way research is used has also changed, Roon executives argue. Executives say research results arrive as AI-generated summaries and bullet points, but the nuance and context that determines whether they are clinically meaningful can be lost.
A recent study in Nature Medicine claims that general-purpose frontier models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude outperform specialized clinical tools such as OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI on medical benchmarks.
“I think the big takeaway is that they’re all becoming more and more similar, and they’re all getting better and better at summarizing and synthesizing the published evidence. But what none of them have is an inference layer or a different interpretation, and that’s what Roon is building, which is differentiating and something you can’t do anywhere else,” Ramakrishna said, noting that Roon is building an “interpretive layer.”
Last month, in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) announces a collaboration with Roon to make it the first official medical journal of the Roon Physician Intelligence Network. Roon executives noted that adding medical journals to the platform is a major step toward making medical knowledge more social, accessible, and practical for doctors. This will provide the platform and the physicians who use it with resources to analyze research, discuss it with colleagues, ask questions and discuss its impact, executives said.
Roon has been live since November and currently has “thousands” of physician users on the platform. According to the company, the range of physicians using the product includes cardiology, obstetrics and gynecology, nephrology, respiratory/critical care medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine/hospital medicine, oncology, and infectious diseases.
Roon members include leading physician Mandy Cohen, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nationally recognized physician and public health leader Deb Oury, and Bob Wachter, dean of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
“Modern medicine allows us to do more for our patients, but corporate pressures and electronic health records have made the practice of medicine less intimate. Roon has filled that void, becoming healthcare’s digital water cooler, a space for expert curation and true collegiate interaction,” Wachter said in a statement.
In addition to popular social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, there are several established online networks for medical professionals such as Doximity, Sermo, and Figure 1. There is also a new social media platform run by social media personality Dr. Glaucomflecken.
Ramakrishna and Bhaskaran said they launched Roon because they felt there was a lack of physician-centric online spaces that provide a trusted environment for discussion, collaboration, debate, and engagement.
“We initially launched on the patient side. We were building patient education and guidance for people overcoming heart disease, and we had thousands of physicians working with us on the patient side. The most feedback we heard over and over again. The feedback was, ‘Hey, you’re building this for patients and I don’t have a place to collaborate and connect in a safe place,”’ CEO Bhaskaran told Fierce Healthcare in May, shortly after Roon was officially launched. has been released.
“Currently, much of the physician community is conducted in WhatsApp group chats, which are highly fragmented. There are thousands of small OB group chats,” he noted.
Physicians told the founders that other networking platforms were built before AI, operated closer to clinical decision support, or were larger, more popular social media platforms.
“The idea of a physician community where doctors could be themselves in a safe space was just a big blank space, so we decided to take a big shot at it. Many of the early MedTwitter people joined the platform, and now it’s a little-kept secret in medicine. Medical leaders are very excited to be here, and they’re having conversations that they wouldn’t have in an open forum like LinkedIn or Twitter,” he added.
Bhaskaran argues that there are lessons to be learned from building platforms like Pinterest and how they apply to the healthcare community. “People at Pinterest were into this more natural, safe place on the internet that wasn’t engagement driven. What we’re trying to inject is just good design, clean UX,” he said. “Pinterest is all about collective intelligence. We think of Roon as a collective intelligence platform where the wisdom of many people is what we are building.”
He added, “I think the big thing we’ve learned at Pinterest is that vertical networks are really important. We’re a vertical network of vertical networks with a lot of unique needs.”
The platform is free for doctors and features sponsored content. Roon also has a growing network of founding physicians who helped “co-build” the platform. Many of these founding physicians were offered equity in the company.
Currently, Roon is only available to physicians, but when asked about opening up the platform to other clinicians and medical professionals, Bhaskaran said Roon is focused on physicians “for the next year.”
“We’re hearing two things. On the one hand, I think doctors really like being a doctor for doctors. That said, the number one request we have is to open it up to people with PhDs and others, from nurses to APPs (advanced care providers),” he said, noting that Roon’s broader goal is to be a “network for health.”
