When Abdullah Norain was a resident surgeon at Mayo Clinic and traveled frequently for conferences, he was struck by the inability to continue the exciting conversations he had with his peers.
“After each meeting, researchers and clinicians want to connect and expand the conversation, but there is no place or forum,” he said. “They can’t really be on Twitter or LinkedIn because of the HIPAA problem with social media.”
To solve this problem, Norain started building Peer Capsules February with His co-founder and CTO is David Martins King. The Phoenix-based startup, which is developing a collaboration platform for professional healthcare associations, recently received significant funding from the AWS Impact Accelerator program, which provides young startups led by founders from underrepresented groups $30 million commitment.
PeerCapsule is building a platform for national and regional supplier associations to enable these groups not only to engage their members internally, but to give members the opportunity to network and collaborate with professionals from other professions and organizations.
When professional medical associations join PeerCapsule, their members join the platform. These societies will use PeerCapsule as a central hub for their members to receive information about dues and events, and to provide a safe way for their members to collaborate with professionals across the country for better collaboration and research.
“If someone is working on a research project and wants to find collaborators, they can do it easily on the platform and don’t have to wait until the annual meeting to submit an abstract to see who’s interested,” Norain said.
PeerCapsule is already testing its platform with a small group of physicians and is starting to join national and regional provider associations. The startup is joining these groups one by one to understand the needs of its members and how to adapt the platform to best serve them.
Norain says PeerCapsule is different from competitors such as utility, as the startup works directly with supplier associations and allows members to conduct clinical studies with members of different organizations. Doximity, which bills itself as the “LinkedIn for doctors,” gets the bulk of its funding from companies that are bundled with drugmakers that recruit doctors or seek to promote their products. PeerCapsule, on the other hand, is still working with vendor organizations to best determine its business model and how to charge these groups for using its platform.
The AWS funding will help Norain and his team continue to develop PeerCapsule’s platform. The funding — which includes a $225,000 grant, $125,000 in cash, and $100,000 in AWS Cloud Credits — will also help PeerCapsule build tools to quickly launch clinical studies on the platform.
“The goal is that researchers will be able to start building research datasets on our platform and eventually present and exchange this information with members,” Norain said. “In this way, the platform is a cohesive place where medical knowledge is incubated and generated.”
Photo: elenabs, Getty Images
