By Ander Iruretagoyena and Priya Parrish
Medical doctors and other healthcare professionals play a vital role in society, as COVID-19 has reminded us all. While the United States is a leader in educating doctors, there is a global need for well-trained physicians and healthcare infrastructure to deliver high-quality care. At the same time, the medical field offers prospects of high quality, well paid, and stable jobs for those who can break into the competitive job market through rigorous academic training. However, due to the systemic limitations of the current medical education model, there is a significant lack of diversity among medical professionals. In the U.S., for example, 6% of active physicians are Latino, 5% are Black, and 36% are Female. Specifically, the lack of diversity among faculty (predominantly White (63.9%) and Male (58.6%)) and unequal resources across schools to support students with rigorous coursework, disadvantages students of diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Compounded with the detrimental effects of implicit bias in delivering care to racial and gender minorities, there is a meaningful opportunity to help narrow the disparities in health outcomes.
Solution
OnlineMedEd (OME) is a global digital healthcare learning platform for aspiring and practicing healthcare professionals. Currently, more than 86% of medical students in the United States use OME to supplement knowledge needed to pass their board exams, as well as in their clinical practice. 250,000 monthly active users learn from the platform, while an average of 50,000 are global users in 191 countries.
Growth among international users has grown 50% as OnlineMedEd has proven its ability to create effective supplementary curriculum beyond medical school walls. Over the past year, OME launched its Crash Course suite of free online video tutorials to more than 30,000 redeployed health care providers helping during the pandemic. The company has also transitioned medical school faculty online, and is a natural partner to support institutions in the transition towards active digital-enabled learning.
Built by founders with medical education experience, the platform is centered around the PACE (Prime, Acquire, Challenge, Enforce) pedagogical method. For each lesson, students have access to:
Prime: Lesson overviews, companion notes, diagrams and key takeaways
Acquire: Peer-reviewed video lectures comprehensively covering the topic and contextualizing within the broader curriculum
Challenge: Board-style questions or quizzes; additional video-based explanations for Q&A
Enforce: Digital Flashcards for review, automatically set to a study calendar based on memory science
Why We Invested
OnlineMedEd’s platform has attained a leading market share, strong user engagement, and favorable brand preference in the traditional medical school market for supplementary education. With its freemium business model, the company is already democratizing access to medical careers by helping students graduate from rigorous programs and succeed as practicing physicians.
The Company originally served 3rd and 4th year medical students, but in the past two years, OnlineMedEd has invested to expand content to address 1st and 2nd year students, creating a full digital medical curriculum. This foundational success positions OME well to expand into a multi billion-dollar addressable market across adjacent verticals (e.g. Nurse Practitioners, PAs, and Dental), geographies, and the complete student lifecycle.
We also see an opportunity for OnlineMedEd to support the development of the next generation of healthcare providers that more fully represent the populations they serve. To do this, OME is partnering with medical schools and other educational institutions to provide its premium content to all students. With effective supplementary content, students from all backgrounds and in schools across tiers and geographies will enter the job market to serve rural and urban communities globally.
Impact
Given its reach, Impact Engine believes OnlineMedEd has an immense opportunity to help increase representation in the medical field in order to actively combat widening health outcome disparities. In addition to its intentionally accessible product, OME is also ensuring diverse representation in patient and practitioner case studies to create more inclusivity within medical schools. Impact Engine’s involvement will focus on strengthening these efforts and exploring new drivers of impact, such as implicit bias training curriculum and programs to increase the diversity of students enrolling in medical school.