An app by a doctor for doctors: Daily Rounds bags seed funding to curate clinical cases

A 35-year-old was out on a morning walk when she suddenly felt dizzy. She sat down on the sidewalk, and couldn’t move from the spot for an hour. Her eyes were ringing, head whirring. This had happened to her once before. Her pulse rate, blood pressure and other general health indicators were normal. What’s wrong with her? How should a doctor treat her?

This is an example of the sort of clinical cases that Daily Rounds feeds its network of doctors to hone their skills. The unique Bangalore-based startup, founded by a doctor, is building a mobile app-based academic support system for doctors. It just raised seed funding of US$500,000 from VC fund Kae Capital, Teruhide Sato, founder of Japan’s Beenos, and accelerator GSF.

The Daily Rounds app gives clinical cases, quizzes, news, and other medical content to the doctors in its network, which has grown to 45,000 in a span of nine months. The plan is to expand to 200,000 doctors in a year from now.

“Every doctor wants to be a better doctor. Being a better doctor is a strong incentive and we provide a platform to help achieve that. We crossed 3,000 five-star ratings in Playstore last week. Considering the users are doctors, we believe the numbers are solid,” says Daily Rounds founder Dr. Deepu Sebin, an MD in internal medicine and critical care.

Doctors, perhaps more than other professionals, cannot afford to be unaware of advances in their field. They subscribe to medical journals, attend conferences, and network in their community to do this. But medical journals rarely make interesting reading material. Young doctors often read up a lot on the internet.

After completing his post-graduation, Sebin was working with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras on a few healthcare projects. “I was working with developers mostly. And I really loved how tech people collaborated and shared material using platforms like Stackoverflow and Github. While we doctors create a lot of clinical cases and academic content, we never share them. So it was a no-brainer for me to go ahead and build something similar [to Github] for doctors,” Sebin tells Tech in Asia.

He founded the startup a year ago, and roped in mobile developer Nimmi Cherian, who had worked with IIT-Madras on the government-backed Akash tablet project, and technologist Priyaank Choubey as co-founders. They launched the Daily Rounds Android app nine months ago.

Daily Rounds has an editorial team which selects clinical cases that present a diagnostic, ethical, or management challenge, are of educational value and based on the latest guidelines. At last count, the app had around 300 new doctors joining the network every day. It has some of the top medical schools in India and the US as partners.

“Our core strength is our team of doctors and coders and the fact that we are solving a real pain point. We are at core a tech company,” Sebin says.

The funding will help Daily Rounds strengthen its tech core and build its data repository.

See: Two college kids solve medical problem, get Sequoia backing