This is a critical but rather uncomfortable question for a founder. It makes you reflect and question the very core of why you set out to build this company.

Perhaps the answers lie somewhere in our past, in our journey to get to the place we are at now. Growing up in a middle-class household, I experienced both the traditional pressures of academic achievement and exposure to rapid technological advances. I believe this must have led me to question many aspects of daily life one would have otherwise taken for granted. Unsurprisingly, some of my medical school contemporaries would jokingly call me ‘but why?’

For a student of science this innate curiosity can be rather handy but could also be limiting in many ways especially when the quantum of information is far too vast to be able to delve too deeply e.g medicine. Essentially, one had to learn to focus and to train. Regardless, a personality once formed is there to stay. I found myself again in the consulting room questioning why patients presented with certain diseases and how society, culture and psychology impacted their health. As a doctor, even if I had all the knowledge in the world but if I could not communicate this in a simple, effective manner, would this benefit anyone ?

After nearly 2 decades in the medical field - I found myself in rural Australia working very closely with a community who nearly had free access to me professionally. The region had particularly high rates of skin cancer (Australia is the skin cancer capital of the world just like India is the diabetes capital of the world). My growing interest in skin cancer saw me complete a Masters Degree in Skin Cancer from the University of Queensland learning from world leaders in the field. I built specific expertise in lesion recognition and usage of an instrument called the dermatoscope. Learning was continuous, collaborative and practical. But even with the best care in the world and reasonably good access to healthcare many questions still remained about why some people had worse outcomes than others?

Healthcare faces a significant supply-demand imbalance that worsens when we try to implement proactive, preventative care approaches (prevention is better than cure). Technology is making remarkable advances in everyday life and medicine. By leveraging data, we can enhance precision, improve information accessibility, and boost confidence in clinical care. However, the abundance of cheap, readily available data has created a new challenge — misinformation and mistrust. We must remember that not everything presented as information is necessarily true. So, while there is an overwhelming ocean of information available there is also a significant amount of mistrust and confusion and healthcare specifically dermatology is no exception.

Circumstances in my life permitted me to step out of the professional rat race and envision building a platform which could leverage the latest advances in information technology and couple that with an evidence based scientific approach. If I could use the collective professional experience of the stalwarts in dermatology to craft a scientific service which could be delivered digitally in a manner where our communication was warm, empathetic, approachable and honest we might find that we would be able to impact the lives of millions of people at scale.

So Formial exists to make evidence based dermatology accessible using cutting-edge technology and personalised care.