Soon after its founding, Medical Joyworks went from breakeven to ‘massively profitable’, according to co-founder Dr Nayana Somaratna who forecasts revenue will top Rs100 million this year. Somaratna developed his first app overnight which impressed his medical colleagues. Soon the app, Prognosis, was being downloaded by thousands of medical professionals from the iTunes store and became the top ranked medical app in the US within weeks after launch. Over 1.5 million Medical Joyworks apps have been downloaded and as many as half a million users are regular. Revenue is generated though advertising.
Prognosis makes learning, refreshing and keeping up-to-date with medical developments, fun. Running on iOS and Android platforms it offers interactivity and media to present scenario-based clinical presentations. The team curates the content and submits it for peer review at least to a couple of specialists in the field before it’s presented in the apps. Its main app Prognosis: Your Diagnosis covers medicine in general and has been followed by two specialist apps for cardiology and diabetes. Joining those will be two more specialist apps for respiratory diseases and STDs. In addition, a new app that creates a peer-to-peer medical community where doctors answer questions of students has had over 1,200 queries submitted and more than three times as many responses.
Medical Joyworks is a virtual company with staff all over the world. They believe that limiting their hiring to a particular geographical area would severely hamper them. It would also waste valuable staff time on the commute, they say. Venture capital firms and angel investors are lining up for a piece of the action but Medical Joyworks doesn’t need the funding, according to Dr Nayana Somaratna, for whom this is the third start-up he has founded in the last five years.