Sustaining Our Mission: MedEdMentor's Path Forward

This September marked the two-year anniversary of MedEdMentor's launch. Since our launch, we've welcomed over 3,700 users from more than 120 countries!

What started with users primarily from North America and Europe has grown into a truly global community. We've had the privilege of connecting with many of you through email, social media, and at conferences worldwide.

You are the reason we built MedEdMentor, and your engagement with our platform continues to inspire our work. Thank you!

As we shared in our founding vision, medical education scholarship (and health professions education scholarship more broadly) has long struggled with systemic inequities.

Well-resourced institutions in the Global North dominate our field's discourse, while brilliant voices from underrepresented communities often lack access to the mentorship, theoretical frameworks, and specialized resources needed to contribute to scholarship.

We created MedEdMentor to democratize access to these essential tools — to level the playing field so that the best ideas can emerge regardless of institutional privilege.

As we begin our third year as a live website, we need to confront a fundamental challenge: sustainability. Greg and I started working on MedEdMentor in 2020, and since then, we have funded every aspect of it from our personal resources — server costs, development, AI integration, content creation, and countless hours of our time.

As our user base has grown from dozens to thousands, and our platform has become more sophisticated, the costs associated with maintaining this resource have grown accordingly.

Just as universities invest in research infrastructure to advance knowledge, we need sustainable funding to maintain and expand this platform that serves our global community.

Beginning this month, we will implement a tiered access model. Core educational content will remain freely accessible, ensuring our equity mission continues. However, advanced interactive features will require a membership for access.

You can become a member as an individual or as part of an institution. Over time, as we expand the capabilities of MedEdMentor, we aim to continue delivering more value to you, both in our paid and free plans.

Our mission remains steadfast: making health professions education more equitable, transparent, and accessible, ultimately improving healthcare education and patient outcomes worldwide.

Improving MedEdMentor's sustainability will help us work toward maintaining and enhancing these resources for our global community.

For individual users working on health professions education projects, our Project Pass system provides focused access when you need it most. Consider using continuing medical education funds if available as this represents exactly the kind of professional development investment these funds are designed to support.
For institutional leaders interested in supporting your faculty's scholarship development, we welcome conversations about institutional partnerships. Please reach out to geoffstetson@mededmentor.org to explore how we can work together.

We wouldn't exist without your support, engagement, and belief in our mission. As we transition to sustainable operations, we're excited to expand our impact while staying true to the values that brought us together: equity, accessibility, and excellence in health professions education.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Yours truly,

Geoff and Greg