There's a new social network for doctors

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There's a New Social Network for Doctors

The skinny
A new social media platform exclusively for doctors launched this week. The free platform, called Roon, 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, said Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna, the startup’s co-founder and president.

Collective wisdom
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, Dr. Ramakrishna explained. In his view, Roon combines two elements: AI-powered research synthesis and 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 There's so much of medicine and health that's unpublished, that's not on the web because it kind of just exists in physicians’ brains,” Dr.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.

Move over, Doximity
It’s not like this platform is the first online forum doctors have ever had to interact with one another, though. 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.

— By Katie Adams

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A New Drug for Alzheimer’s Patients

What happened?
The FDA approved Axsome Therapeutics drug Auvelity as a treatment for agitation in Alzheimer’s disease patients. The twice-daily pill was first approved in 2022 as a treatment for major depressive disorder.

The drug
Auvelity is an oral small molecule designed to block NMDA receptors and activate sigma-1 receptors. While the way this approach treats Alzheimer’s agitation is not fully understood, it’s believed to modulate neurotransmitters involved in Alzheimer’s.

Why this matters
Alzheimer’s agitation can develop as as verbal and even physical aggression. Antipsychotic and anxiety medications are used off label to treat this common symptom of the disease. Rexulti, the first FDA-approved drug for Alzheimer’s agitation, comes with a black box warning for a higher risk of death when used by elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis. Auvelity’s new approval does not include such a warning.

Soundbite
“I think Auvelity is likely to be the first choice for prescribers,” said Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, professor of brain sciences at the UNLV Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine. “There’s no medication which is going to work for every patient, so there’ll be room for other drugs on the market. I think Auvelity will do very well within the therapeutic landscape of this very large problem.”

—By Frank Vinluan

Why Metabolic Health Is a Common Thread Across Diabetes, Heart Disease, and Some Cancer

Beyond diabetes
It turns out that so many other conditions have a metabolic root cause – and by extension, a metabolic root cure. Cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease, for example, were always more common in patients with diabetes – but it wasn’t until the American Heart Association recognized the cardiovascular-kidney metabolic (CKM) syndrome in 2023 that clinicians aligned behind this concept. The same is true of metabolic dysfunction–associated steatohepatitis (MASH), a liver disease driven by poor metabolic health that was only renamed in 2023 – underscoring how recently the field has begun connecting these dots.

The cancer connection
We think of cancer as a disease of genetic mutations leading to unchecked cell growth – tumor cells replicate and expand until they damage the surrounding tissue and spread throughout the body. What’s less well understood is why cancer is more likely in patients with metabolic disease – obesity and diabetes. One theory is that inflammation caused by metabolic disease contributes to cancer’s growth and spread by impairing the body’s ability to detect and repair abnormal cells; another theory is that some cancer cells thrive on high levels of glucose and insulin – two components of metabolic disease.

Reversal
The common mechanism for reversing metabolic disease seems to be the sustained flattening of the hills and valleys of glucose and insulin. Consider a breakfast bagel: it’s quickly converted to glucose in the intestine, blood glucose levels rise, insulin spikes in order to move that glucose into cells, and pretty soon blood glucose falls. When liver and muscle glucose storage is full, additional glucose is converted to fat, contributing to body fat stores and obesity, including abnormal fat accumulation around the abdominal organs causing organ dysfunction. Excess body fat drives inflammation which is a key component of insulin resistance.

— By MedCity Influencer Adam Wolfberg

Beyond Support Teams: The Strategic Role of Centers of Excellence in Healthcare

Growing importance
COEs enable strategic advantage and operational efficiency, which is why they are growing in importance across industries. But the fragmentation and resource constraints that plague healthcare move COEs from important to critical. Without centralized governance and expertise, decision-making can become fragmented. Inconsistent, incompatible workflows, duplicated effort, escalating costs, and burnout are the result, as the healthcare industry knows only too well.

Technology investments often fail to perform as hoped, not because the tools are inadequate, but because adoption and utilization are managed inconsistently across the organization. A well-designed COE addresses this.

Guardrails, not roadblocks
COEs define standards that ensure safety, compliance, and interoperability but still allow for flexibility wherever adaptation is necessary. There is innovation, but within defined parameters so healthcare organizations can support unique clinical needs without introducing complexity and unnecessary variation. For clinicians, a COE with the right balance between standardization and flexibility means workflows that are both consistent and responsive to change. For IT teams, it reduces duplicative work and support burden. For leadership, it delivers predictability without sacrificing agility.

More than a passing trend
In today’s cash- and staffing-strapped, high-stakes healthcare environment, COEs are an operational necessity. The most successful organizations treat COEs as long-term strategic investments, or engines for scalable, sustainable transformation. When designed and executed well, they help healthcare organizations turn technology complexity into simplified workflows and measurable performance and cost outcomes.

— By MedCity Influencer Jake Morrison

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There's a new social network for doctors