The Standard for Mentorship in Medicine

MentorMeMed is an online platform, designed to connect medical students and trainees from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine (URiM) to affinity-based mentorship in self-identified areas of need.

4 Core Beliefs

Fostering a diverse healthcare workforce is critical to providing equitable care for the increasingly diverse US population. Those from URiM backgrounds have faced multilevel barriers to entering and remaining in healthcare. Mentorship is a key component of the strategy to overcome these barriers. Unfortunately, effective mentorship is a resource that is not equitably accessed by all people. MentorMeMed seeks to remedy this problem.

Sustainable Infrastructure

A mentorship infrastructure must rely on more than altruism to be sustainable and impactful in the long-term.

Minority Tax Reduction

Institutions can reduce the “minority tax” by spreading out mentorship responsibilities and offering mentor reward.

Mentorship Network

Comprehensive, quality mentorship is accomplished from a “network” or “quilt” approach because most people are unlikely to get everything they need from one person.

Equity in Medical Education

We unapologetically focus on those groups that traditionally have been marginalized in medical education: URiM’s, those from low SES backgrounds and those who are from the first generation in their families to graduate college.

Our Vision

To Build a National Mentorship Network

To build a national mentorship network, with multiple contributing institutions and a diverse mentor pool, representing various identities, backgrounds, and specialties. Our data show that students and trainees from our target population prefer mentors with whom they share some affinity, even if that affinity is not racial. Therefore, we aim to recruit a large mentor pool, to increase the likelihood that our mentees find the best matches.

We know the Problems and Solutions…

Problems

Poor health outcomes experienced by communities of color across myriad diseases
Lack of racial and ethnic diversity among the healthcare provider workforce
- Underrepresentation due to leaky educational pipeline, decreased opportunities to advance within medicine, and increased attrition at medical school, residency and faculty levels

Solutions

Research shows that a diverse healthcare workforce improves the health of populations
Although not a panacea, quality mentorship is a practical strategy to diversify medicine

Strategy for Scale and Growth

Our model has great potential for scale and growth

Supporting the end of the educational pathway

There are 155 medical schools (MD) and 38 osteopathic schools (DO) in the US that are potential subscribers.
We plan to expand the platform into other professional medical and allied fields with similar problems of underrepresentation (nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, public health, research).

Recruiting into medicine & mentoring more groups

Eventually, we plan to expand the platform to include premed tracks across the US.
Also, this expansion will consider other marginalized and special groups.