Dr Asif Qasim is a consultant cardiologist in London and a technology entrepreneur. Here he shares his story of how he founded a medical knowledge platform (figure 1), which now has around 1 million members in 190 countries.

During my PhD (2002–2005) I discovered networks such as MySpace and Naseeb and saw the potential of this technology for social good; and playing university tennis brought into focus the challenge of trying to play sport when you leave school and university and lose that structure and network. To tackle this, I developed comenplay.com, a profile-based sport and exercise platform. This pre-Facebook community with the strap line ‘Find people to play with’ gained partnerships with Sport England and many sports clubs and associations. comenplay.com grew to over 25 000 members through these partnerships coupled with social media promotion and press exposure, for example, being featured as Time Out Website of the Week.

This experience allowed me to devise and quickly launch g-cardio.net—The Global Cardiology Network—while I was an Interventional Fellow in Milan in 2007. The website included forums, learning modules, chat, publications and cases. We also developed Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine processing technology funded by a UK government business research and development grant that allowed members to share and discuss angiograms and medical images. At the time such matched grant funding was available from Department of Trade …