While that title might feel like it was written in the early 2000s, that’s the level of archaism we’re dealing with when it comes to the healthcare industry. Despite being one of the most important and valuable industries in society, the world of healthcare has been both reticent and slow to adopt technology — in its day-to-day activity, let alone online. During the pandemic, however, that had to change. Millions of healthcare professionals rapidly adopted online technology for their work, many for the first time. While some of this is now reverting to pre-pandemic offline delivery, one of the areas that we think has shifted permanently is healthcare training.

Globally, there are 59 million healthcare professionals for all 7.8 billion people. They tend to work 60+ hour weeks and on top of their regular work, they have to do 1–2 hours of continuous medical training each week on techniques, disease awareness, new research done in their field, etc. That training is typically delivered by a working healthcare professional, often someone senior in their field. The trainer has to use a combination of Google sheets, Word, PDFs, Eventbrite, and (increasingly) Zoom to deliver the training offline, online, or a hybrid of both.

The friction is high, the user experience for the trainer and trainees is appalling, and the output is siloed. Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse — there’s a shortage of healthcare professionals that would require an increase in global healthcare training capacity by one third to train the 18 million additional healthcare professionals the world needs by 2030.

Enter Phil McElnay and MedAll.

Phil is a surgeon who has trained medical professionals across the UK. He also loves software and is passionate about using it to drastically improve healthcare training globally. He launched MedAll with Alan Gibson in 2020 with the ambition of building a globally available online medical school. MedAll is currently an end-to-end platform for organisations to deliver and certify training to medical professionals. In the future, Phil and Alan want to build a network that enables medical professionals to find the best, most relevant educational content, regardless of geography, and automatically build their digital education and interest profile.

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Five Reasons Why We Invested

• Unique founder experience and insight: Phil has worked as a cardiac surgeon, an instructor and a pharma executive and has a passion for product and technology. This combination has enabled him to envision a solution that works at global scale.
• Category creation: By enabling healthcare professionals to access high-quality content and connect with each other from anywhere in the world, MedAll is primed to create and own the “global education network for healthcare professionals” category.
• Prime market: Healthcare professionals are a highly valuable, highly leveraged vertical. A mere 59 million professionals deliver care to 7.8 billion humans globally, and every one of them needs continuous medical education.
• An amazing PLG engine: MedAll focuses on building the best product for organisations and instructors (”content producers”) who deliver training. These producers in turn invite individuals onto MedAll. This has enabled a team of 3 to acquire 1.2k content producers who have in turn added almost 60k individuals onto the platform.
• Multiple vectors of value: It’s rare to find a company that has so many vectors of value. MedAll already has fantastic product-led growth, atomic networks of users, a system of record for medical education certification, and a steady stream of returning users. It’s also building a valuable content library that will add even more value as it grows.