just keep LEARNING, just keep learning
and why we invested in MEDALL
JANUARY 2022
by Sebastian Anastassiou and Marta Gaia Zanchi
Just as Dory keeps on swimming, medical professionals need to keep on learning. They need to stay up to date with the ever evolving field that is medicine, enabling them to provide the highest quality care to their patients. However, the delivery process of continuing medical education today is painstakingly manual, and it hinges on an improvised patchwork of general purpose tools such as eventbrite, google sheets and zoom. Out of mad frustration of the status quo, Dr Phil McElnay set out to rectify this state of affairs, and developed an end-to-end platform solution that enables healthcare training organizations to deliver effective professional medical and healthcare education. This is where MedAll comes in, with over 500 organizations and 30k healthcare professionals already using the platform.
Keep on reading if you want to take a deeper dive!
There is inadequate healthcare training capacity.
According to a report by the World Health Organization virtually all countries around the world face pre-existing health workforce challenges, including shortages and misalignment of needs and skills. The demand for and size of the global health workforce are forecasted to grow substantially in the next decades as a consequence of population and economic growth, combined with demographic and epidemiologic transitions. Globally, we need to train 18 million more healthcare professionals by 2030 to guarantee health system operations. The shortage is exacerbated by ever increasing specialization and fragmentation of medical specialties.
The biggest challenge is not just one of qualification for access to the profession via specialized graduate education, but of continuous training. Medicine is a science that keeps evolving constantly, which implies that physicians must stay up to date with the latest novelties to offer quality care to their patients.
Lifelong learning is not only an essential part of a physician’s calling: to keep a medical license valid, a practicing physician must document continuing education, and most physicians who are certified in a specialty also have to fulfill additional certification requirements, generally monitored by national organizations.
Education is, of course, only one in a broader area of needs that must be addressed to shape health labor markets in order to meet this goal. In addition to education, these needs range from assessment, planning, recruitment, management, retention, incentives and productivity.
We at Nina Capital believe that this is an area of need worth developing into an investment thesis, and see education as the rightful place to start. What we have learned in our research is that there’s simply not enough time, resources or medical schools to keep training healthcare professionals in the same way as it has been done traditionally. In studying MedAll, we have come face to face with a chronic under-investment and inadequacy of tools used in education and training. There is a mismatch between cutting age technology implementations in healthcare organizations, and appallingly outdated education strategies for the physicians that are crucial to its adequate functioning. Perhaps that is in part because a hospital’s new state-of-art surgical suite is sure to please press, public, and philanthropic donors alike; whereas, proper courses for the hospital’s medical staff is hardly newsworthy. The best way to achieve up-to-date knowledge of medicine is to receive quality training sessions, as well as to attend courses, symposiums, or congresses — a topic that seldom makes headlines. Yet it is a large business, and it is ripe for disruptions.
Simply put, there is inadequate healthcare training capacity.
Traditionally, professional medical organizations are formed by physicians and for physicians to deliver these training opportunities, becoming accredited providers of continuing medical education. Worldwide, a large number of medical organizations help physicians stay current in their fields with up-to-date journals and research, as well as helping them learn about board certification in a particular specialty. Many of these organizations have resources specific to medical school students, beneficial when trying to learn more about the particulars of a specialty and the type of training required to become a practicing physician in that field. Some of these organizations can be very large, like for example, the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) for osteopathic physicians, representing more than 70,000 osteopathic physicians around the world: the group strives to support efforts of doctors to provide low-cost, quality health care, advance the practice of osteopathic medicine, and more.
There are tens of thousands of healthcare organizations, and the majority of them do not look at all like the AOA. Instead, they are small, reach an average of <100 physicians each, and are increasingly struggling to deliver on their mission. Remember, these associations are formed by physicians, for physicians — and physicians are simply not the best people when it comes to organizing and delivering educational conferences, content, and certification. Their process of delivery today is painstakingly manual, and it hinges on a patchwork of general purpose tools such as email, spreadsheets, powerpoint, mailchimp, youtube… From validating a physician’s professional email address to customizing a certificate in powerpoint to soliciting feedback from attendees and responding to requests for materials after a training event, the process today is one made possible by the good will and patience of people who inevitably make mistakes and run against inefficiencies, waste, and general dissatisfaction about the task at hand. Not to mention, on a shoestring budget.
The impact of the pandemic:
The pandemic has further impacted the availability and capacity of health workers to deliver essential services and meet surge needs. Training events were mainly being held in-person, in part due to their perception by a subset of physicians as opportunities to network with other colleagues — though as we have learned, there’s already a great generational divide about this preference, and, barriers to access further deepen generational and gender inequality responsible at least in part of the great hierarchical model of healthcare as a profession.
Nevertheless, in March 2020, with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic this situation changed completely. There was a critical medical need to share all the new scientific evidence regarding management and treatment of covid-19 which, forced by the mobility restrictions, led to a massive increase in medical virtual events. Seventeen months later and with the pandemic still not under control, educational events from all specialties are still being held online. While we hope the worst of the pandemic is behind us, there are no signs nor pressure from medical doctors that point to a strong necessity of going fully back to having these training events in-person. The pandemic and its economic consequences have only added further complications to what was already an interaction environment ripe for digital disruption.
So here we are, in the eye of the storm. Physicians need continuous education. Medical organizations want to deliver quality education. And the pandemic has stressed the dysfunctional, outdated setup of relationships for content delivery.
Enter MedAll.
