Roon: The TikTok Of Dementia Caregiving

In this episode of Ask Dr. Mia, Rohan Ramakrishna, co-founder of Roon, discusses the innovative healthcare technology platform designed to provide patients with reliable medical information. 

Roon aims to bridge the gap between patients and healthcare experts, offering personalized guidance and 24/7 support. Rohan shares insights into the journey of building Roon, the importance of expert vetting, and the platform's commitment to keeping the service free for users. The conversation also touches on the global reach of Roon and its future aspirations to expand access to healthcare information worldwide.

Rohan Ramakrishna is a professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Presbyterian hospitals and the Co-Founder of Roon. He attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. He then completed training in neurosurgery at the University of Washington and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

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Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Roon and Its Purpose

02:57
The Journey of Building Roon

06:03
The Unique Features of Roon

09:14
Expert Vetting and Content Quality

11:51
User Engagement and Feedback

14:57
Global Reach and Future Aspirations

#Roon, #healthcare technology, #patient information, #expert guidance, #caregiver support, #medical information, #health app, #user experience, #global access, #mental health

Transcript

0:02

back to Ask Dr. Mia podcast. And today I'm very excited to tell you all about a technology platform called Roon. And I also have Rohan Ramakrishna, who is a professor of neurosurgery and one of the co founders for Roon joining us today. I know Rohan and I have chatted before this recording, and he and his co founders started Roam because they wanted patients to have a trusted source of medical information rather than from Dr. Google. Basically anytime and anywhere. So welcome to the podcast Rohan. Thank you, Mia. It's great to be with you and appreciate the opportunity to chat. Thank you. Well, I guess one of the first questions that I like to ask my my guest speakers is who are you caring for right now in your life? Well, don't think I'm caregiving right now, but I am parenting with my wife, our kids of three, our three kids who are nine, six, and two. So it's quite busy, as you can imagine, with kids in that age range. But as they say, small kids, small problems. it's bigger kids, bigger problems. So it's been, it's really quite fun and enjoyable to be in this particular phase of their lives. Yeah, my kids are eight and five, almost nine and six. So I think it's a great age. And we are not brave enough to try for three. I feel like that third one will just tip us over. Yeah. Well, the third one has to just learn to survive, you know, in that kind of environment. So it's been fun to see actually. Wonderful. So I know why you started Room, but I'm curious, how did you start Room? Because I think not everyone can build up a technology platform like you guys have built. I'm just curious, how did you start it? Well, it takes a village. think, you know, to your point, why did we start it? How did we start it? You know, just had this set of observations from my time as a practicing neurosurgeon where my patients were getting bad information, terrible information from the internet, right? From Dr. Google, from WebMD, from Reddit, from Facebook groups, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. And You know, I wonder why is this the best that we have on the one hand, we can get an Uber instantaneously. We can get a package from Amazon tomorrow. We have Rover circling Mars, but when it comes to getting personalized health guidance, we're kind of still in the stone ages, you know? And so we asked the question, what would it take to give everyone a free personalized guide for health powered by the knowledge of the world's best experts? And that's sort of the motivating factor behind why we build a road. To your question about how we do it, it does take a village. know, my co-founders include people from Pinterest. And the idea there was to mix the best of consumer technologies with the best of medical so that we could develop something that really resonated with patients and families and met people where they are so we can give people trusted information whenever they needed. And so at this point, we have a growing team, many engineers, lots of doctors. And then all the different experts that come together, you know, close to a thousand and growing rapidly of physicians and other experts who've come together to kind of power the system. That's great. And I know one of the great things about room is that it is free, but it is not free to set it up. So how does the funding work on your side? Yeah, so we are a private company and we have raised investment funds to help power this and to hire the kinds of people we need, you know, in order to develop and grow Rune. In terms of how Rune will sustain itself in the long term, Rune will likely have some sponsorships, you know, to help power and fund the service. But For now, well forever, our goal is to keep it free to every patient and caregiver out there. Perfect. And speaking of those caregivers who might be listening, what is one main takeaway that you want people to leave with after they listen to this particular episode? You're not alone. You know, there's so many people that are dealing with the same thing you're dealing with or similar things. you know, Rune was created so you don't have to feel alone, right? Rune answers many and all of the questions that come up in a healthcare journey, not just the medical, but also the practical and emotional. So when it comes to dementia, for example, you know, the emotional questions might... have to deal with caregiver burnout and how do you deal with this and the depression or the anxiety that you might feel when you're taking care of someone with dementia who has a lot of needs and you're struggling financially, et cetera. There's also the practical, like if I need respite care, how do I evaluate that type of facility? If I need a nursing facility, how do I evaluate that? mean, all memory care, all these practical questions, which many doctors, not for any fault of their own, don't really know the answers to. Mm-hmm. so we harness that knowledge. And then of course, the, you know, like I said, the emotional, you know, I'm having trouble dealing with this. How do I deal, you know, how do I move forward? And so we across the medical, emotional and practical really cover everything that people are facing when they're dealing with an advanced dementia diagnosis. And so I think the fact that you're not alone and you can get an instant answer anytime you need it, that's what Root is here for. And that's great. I, I always, I think, I think of room almost like the tick tock of reliable medical information. I know that's not, that's not a nothing for or against tick tock, but I like the fact that it's digestible, small pieces of information in a video format, which, as we know, with other technologies is oftentimes very engaging and easier for people to take in than say, reading an article or sometimes even listening to a podcast. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think the video aspect of it is really important because they're short videos, but they're, see the people that are giving you the answers, right? And so I think that piece of it is extremely important because what we're trying to do is build a trusted ecosystem, the most trusted ecosystem when it comes to health information. And I think, you know, unsighted text or, you know, from what God knows which source. is not very trustworthy, right? In the current world of AI, there's infinite information. There are infinite sources that are out there that claim to have great information. But where do you get that nuanced information where an expert can break down what was in a publication or what was in the news or what it's really like to get leukembi, you know, one of these new monoclonals for Alzheimer's? You know, what is the real world evidence of how it actually works in practice? I think those sorts of nuanced questions and answers don't really exist anywhere else except on Roon. And so we're really proud of Yeah, that's great. And how do you vet experts to find the best of the best who can explain complicated topics in digestible format? Because I know the CV is certainly one thing in our resume, but that doesn't always mean that people can explain things in a way that is not only accurate, but also personable. Right. So we actually speak and vet every single expert on RUNE. And I should mention that experts are not just doctors on RUNE. Experts are social workers, PTOT, speech therapy, financial and legal experts who can help you with that aspect of caregiving. Really anybody that has expertise to lend across any aspect of a health journey. Right. And so those are our experts. In terms of how we find them, kind of, you know, we we surveil academic facilities across the country to look for people who have a expertise and a focus in this area, specifically whether it's Alzheimer's or frontal temporal dementia, et cetera, Lewy body dementia. And we interview them and we make sure that they fit that overlapping Venn diagram of being both a great clinician and also a great communicator. And so once we talk to them, we bring them onto the platform and then every piece of content on Root is actually evaluated both before publication and then continuously afterwards so that we can make sure it remains accurate and up to date. Great. Yeah. And I know you get a lot of information from the users of the technology as well. How do you know and how do you track what people ask and who to go after in terms of providing that needed information that may not be currently available on room? So before we launch any condition, we actually populate the service, you know, the particular condition, let's say in this case dementia, with thousands of questions and answers. So when we launch something, there's already a very sizable corpus of information. And it turns out that corpus that we launched, whether it's dementia or any of our other conditions like glioblastoma or ALS or menopause and women's health in general, which we're launching now, it turns out that those questions we launched with roughly capture 80, 90 % of the questions people have. And then that remaining bit, we, you you can ask questions on Roon, as you just mentioned, and then based on the type of question we will, if it's unanswered, we will find an expert, the suitable expert to help answer it. And so we can usually get those answers back very quickly. And it's, you know, a really delightful experience, I think, for patients and families across the country because it's almost like an instant expert opinion, right? Wherever you are, it doesn't matter if you're in Lexington, Kentucky or Dearborn, Michigan or Scranton, Pennsylvania or New York City where I am at, you can get an instant answer from a world expert. And this is like one of the great value propositions. That's great. And how do you know whether people are looking for a better answer or that they're not satisfied with the answer that they're getting with existing videos? Well, they don't tell us necessarily what their motivation for asking the question is, right? They just ask the question and then we do our best to give the right answer. So I can't really say what the motivations are behind their questions, but certainly it's an informational gap that they have. I mean, that's why they're asking it. But in terms of whether they're satisfied with their current healthcare or not, think hard to know, but I think we can generally say that people are dissatisfied with their access to healthcare, right? You when it comes to getting an appointment for a neurologist or a geriatrician or et cetera, you know, there's often a long wait, right? No matter where you are in the country and you only have limited time with your doctor, you know, the average, depending on the specialty might be between 11 and 20 minutes. And so where do you, how do you possibly get all your questions answered? Right? Just what, you know, if your main question when you go to the doctor is about, let's say, um, difficult behaviors in someone with advanced dementia, you can spend that whole time talking just about that. But then there's a billion other questions you might have, right? Around, maybe it's a memory care center, maybe it's a nursing facility, maybe it's, you know, practical and emotional help for yourself. Like there's all these different things that you just don't have the time to get to in the doctor's office. And so I think hopefully Rune can help fill those gaps for people. Right. guess going back to that core set of questions that you launched for each condition, how do you know and how do you determine what is a core set of questions? Well, we have a pretty big medical team. And so we look at the, evaluate, kind of learn the condition, you know, and we can do that really rapidly because we're a team of doctors. And then we study what people are asking on the internet, on social, et cetera. And we kind of bring all that data together to create the questions that, you know, we populate on. Thank you. And then, and then one of the questions that I know I had and I think the audience is also might be curious is that, you know, because this technology is free now doesn't necessarily mean they'll be free forever. What would you say is sort of the business model for room. Yeah, yeah. our goal is to keep it free forever. That is our goal and that is our intention and that's what we aim to do. you know, whether you're in Bangladesh or India or New York, we want to give you a free personalized expert guide for health. So that's our mission. And as I mentioned earlier, our goal in terms of funding this is through sponsorships. And so we haven't done that yet, but that won't be for sometime in the future. But like I said, the goal is to keep it free for everyone. Great. Thank you. Are there anything that has been surprising to you when launching Roong and then the process of meeting with all the different experts as well as hearing from users? Yeah, I mean, I think I've been pleasantly surprised at the reception Roon has gotten, both from patients, families, doctors. I think doctors love taking care of patients. That's why they wanted to medicine, right? So if you kind of ask a doctor what's the most fun part of their job, it's really just sitting in front of a patient and helping them get better. And I think as we... can attest to in medicine nowadays, there's so many other factors that are less pleasant when it comes to being a doctor or working in healthcare. that physician-patient interaction is ultimately what keeps us in medicine, right? And keeps us motivated to keep practicing. So I think Rune, what it does for doctors, it helps amplify that aspect of it. As you know, you're on Rune. We ask you the questions that patients ask, hopefully. Hopefully you can use, and we see this, right, that doctors use Rune to help supplement and augment the education of their patients, both before, during, and after an office visit, because they're helped building this new knowledge ecosystem where, again, patients can get expert answers anytime and anyplace. And so I think doctors are really glommed on to the fact that Rune takes the best part of medicine and kind of scales it up for the world. I think on the patient side, it's been fascinating too, right? Because we get the beauty of Root is it's available anytime 24 seven, right? So there's no call center. There's no, you just get your answer immediately. And that aspect to be able to see these experts that you would never have access to potentially ever and get sort of their nuanced view of the world in your particular condition, I think really resonates with folks. You one of the statistics that we love to share is there's 2000 neurologists in Massachusetts and that's more than the number of neurologists in all of India. And so how do we, and even in Massachusetts, there's an access problem when it comes to neurology. So think about other places where there's much less physicians. And so if you think of migraines, just think of, know, if you have migraines, there's like a six or nine month wait to see a neurologist in most places. Well, a lot of that stuff, hopefully you can start getting some information about how to like, think about migraines and like what the workup is going to be and things you can do ahead of time before your first visit with a neurologist, you're not just waiting, right? And so giving people agency in their healthcare is something in addition to information is something that we're really passionate about and something we're really working hard on. think Jonathan Roseanne is an example, is a professor at Harvard and he has his brain health score, right? And in the brain health score, talk about all these things that you can do to prevent dementia. And, you know, they include social relationships, right? And having a sense of community around you and avoiding exercise and avoiding diabetes and things like these. Much of this is probably not news to people, like, be healthy. But I think on the flip side, hearing it from people in a nuanced way can help give you agency to implement those behaviors in your life. So we're really excited about this opportunity. to not just educate but influence people into better, healthier lives. Yeah, and I have to say as an expert who have recorded with Rung, all of the questions have been really similar to what patients and families have asked me within either within the clinical encounter itself or after the clinical encounter. I guess the only potential downside, it's not really a downside is just not knowing the specific scenario behind a question because as a clinician, I want to automatically ask back to the person who asked the question. So what do you mean by X, Y, and Z? But, you know, I try to answer to the best of my abilities, but that's also the benefit of having multiple experts sort of answering the same question because we may each interpret that question in a slightly different way and provide a slightly different answer, but overall will provide a complete answer to the person who's interested in the answer to that question. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up. mean, we do ask questions that have the opportunity to have lots of different nuanced perspectives to multiple doctors. And the reason we do that is just as you said, there's lots of nuance depending on the patient population you treat, your particular cultural experience, et cetera. And so we want to kind of capture all of that and be able to surface it to people. Because how people might practice given facts on the ground in Louisiana versus Texas versus Pennsylvania may be different. So we need to make sure that we capture all those different perspectives that go into how we take care of patients. Great. And I know, I'm guessing that most of the users and experts are based in the United States. But I also know that there are some folks who listen to this podcast internationally. And as you said also earlier, that the access to experts is oftentimes much, much less in countries outside of the United States. Do we know, or do we have experts who are based outside of the US or users based outside of the US within Roon? So most of our experts are United States experts, but we do have a few that are based in places like Canada, India, et cetera, the UK that we've found. But we want to grow that over time, of course. In terms of our audience, we're in over 100 countries today. So we have lots of users from all over the world, English speaking for the most part. In the future, Roon will be in multiple languages. And so we're excited to do that. But yeah, so far we're in over 100 countries and I think that's growing, which is great. Wow, that's amazing that it's already in more than 100 countries. So great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Rohan. And thank you to those of you who are listening. Where can they check out Roon? Yeah, so you can go to rune.com, R-O-O-N, .com on your mobile phone or your desktop or laptop, or you can download Rune for your iPhone from the App Store. Just type in Rune, R-O-O-N, and it'll be one or two down in the search box. And we'd love to see you there so we can help. Perfect. Is the app currently available in Android or only iPhone for now? There's not a specific Android app, but for Android users, you can access it using your mobile browser at Root.com. Yep. Gotcha. Okay, great. Well, thank you again for joining. If you have enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who might also want to hear about Roon and talk to you all next time. Thanks.