The Startup Magazine Q&A Session with Neil Cooper founder of Clinical Current

This week The Startup Magazine had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Cooper, founder of Clinical Current. Clinical Current is an online networking platform for clinicians to share information, knowledge and expertise with their colleagues. We initially intended it to be a large scale network but we’re now focusing on smaller groups of users with common interests.

To find out mor about how Clinical Current works, have a look at thier video:

1) What are the benefits clinicians get from Clinical Current?

There are many sites that aim to provide a social networking space for clinicians. This is all well and good but clinicians are very busy people and there’s always Facebook for those that want to be social. Clinical Current comes at it from a different angle … we focus on what’s really important to clinicians – being better professionals. We give our users the tools to connect and share valuable information so they can learn and develop. In this respect we harness the power of the clinical community so that one person’s knowledge can be easily shared with others who will benefit from it.

2) What was the motivation for starting Clinical Current?

We’ve been involved in the health space for quite a few years and we were getting a bit frustrated by the slow pace of technology transfer into healthcare. If you look at the consumer space there are so many new and innovative technologies that enable people to connect, to share information and to have relevant information served to them but there was relatively little application of these specifically for clinicians. This got us thinking about what we could do to speed things up a little and ultimately led to us creating Clinical Current.

3) How long has Clinical Current been in the making?

We’ve been working on the idea for about 18 months.

4) What stage is your business currently at?

We’ve had active users for 6 months now and we’re just about to complete our beta phase. We’re spending a lot of time raising our profile and developing relationships with clients.

5) What would you like to achieve with Clinical Current?

We want provide our users with real value. If doctors are coming to us saying that Clinical Current has helped them – to find out something new, to learn more quickly, to connect with colleagues whose knowledge and expertise has benefited them – then we’ll feel that we’ve built something that’s truly valuable to our users and is having a positive effect on healthcare.

6) What has been your biggest challenge so far at Clinical Current?

Well like most start ups there have been a lot of challenges but I guess the biggest one was when we decided to move away from our idea of building a large scale network. We changed direction because we realised that focusing on smaller groups of clinicians with a common interest would be more valuable to users and it would also be easier to build traction that way. It wasn’t quite a full pivot but it was a significant change in direction and it took us a while to develop an appropriate business strategy to go with it.

Our initial plan was to set up a network with thousands of doctors then mine the data to understand what’s going on in healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies pay a lot to know what doctors think so it was a sound idea in theory. In practice it was going to be very difficult to build the user base to a sufficient scale hence the change in direction. That obviously meant we needed to find a new way to make money and that was where the real challenge lay. We’ve got a more diversified business strategy now – we provide consultancy services, we produce market reports, and we manage niche communities of clinicians for clients – which is a much more sustainable model to be working with.

7) If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?

Take time with planning but be quick with your execution.