Supporting the Next Generation of Healthcare Professionals
For a number of years, our team at Lumos Capital Group has evaluated the healthcare education market, looking for impactful products and services that can increase global access to high quality content and modernize our healthcare education system. COVID-19 offered all of us a stark reminder of the critical role of our healthcare workers. In the coming years, healthcare jobs are projected to be among the fastest growing around the world, with many societies, including developed markets like the United States, facing critical shortages.
Today, we are proud to announce that Lumos Capital Group has led a growth investment in OnlineMedEd, a leading digital healthcare education platform. Through this partnership, we hope to support the next generation of healthcare professionals and enable schools of medicine, nursing and other adjacent institutions to train many more students in the years to come.
Today, we are proud to announce that Lumos Capital Group has led a growth investment in OnlineMedEd, a leading digital healthcare education platform.
Over the past year, the pandemic has forced schools and teachers to adjust to a new virtual environment, while also creating opportunities to reimagine and improve the global learning ecosystem. It was in the aftermath of a different crisis — Hurricane Katrina — that co-founders Jamie and Dustyn, graduate students at Tulane University in New Orleans, began to reimagine how to increase access to high quality medical education. OnlineMedEd was conceived as a scalable, high- impact digital platform that would bring world class medical education to the world.
Today, OnlineMedEd is a “go-to” instructional resource for medical students worldwide. Over 85% of all medical students in the U.S. use its products, a testament to the quality of the company’s digital learning content and resources. From the onset, the founding team set out to build a comprehensive learning platform with a rich pedagogical approach that tied learning to effective clinical practice. Rather than focusing on memorization and test preparation, the founders built their product to enhance practical understanding, tying every part of the medical sciences together in a cohesive curriculum. This approach has become even more important today, given the recent changes to USMLE’s Step exams, notably the shift of Step 1 from scores to pass-fail and the removal of the Step 2 Clinical Skills assessment. These changes provide greater emphasis on clinical knowledge, where OnlineMedEd has its roots, and prioritize understanding over raw test scores, aligning well to the company’s learning approach. And core to the mission and model has been access: providing students in every country around the world free access to high quality healthcare education content. Jamie and Dustyn’s emphasis on comprehensive learning and widespread access resonated with us from the very beginning.
Over 85% of all medical students in the U.S. use its products, a testament to the quality of the company’s digital learning content and resources
More recently, we have seen a clear opportunity to double down on OnlineMedEd’s impact by deepening relationships with institutions directly. Over the last decade universities have increasingly adopted digital resources to support their learning environments; this trend has been further accelerated by the pandemic. Many schools have looked to OnlineMedEd as a trusted partner given the offering’s pedagogical rigor. Going forward, we see a significant opportunity for institutions globally to work more closely with OnlineMedEd using their platform to provide students with necessary instructional support while shifting faculty time in the classroom toward higher value discussions and activities.
The success OnlineMedEd has had in serving students and institutions in the medical field is only the start. Their approach has wide applicability across healthcare verticals, where the need is just as great for holistic digital instructional support. Furthermore, OnlineMedEd can play a role in supporting healthcare professionals throughout their entire development from early schooling through day-to-day practice, not just during their undergraduate or graduate education.
With this investment, we are excited to be working with Jamie, Dustyn and the entire team at OnlineMedEd to build deeper partnerships with institutions around the world in support of the next generation of healthcare professionals.