Mission3

Mission3 is a non-profit organization founded by Dr. Cristy Page, Residency Director at UNC Family Medicine, in 2015. The inaugural Board of Directors is a tight-knit group with a diverse background of experience in medical education, philanthropy, private industry, medical workforce development, communication, and marketing. Dr. Page, as an experienced residency program director and a committed clinician-educator, serves as the guiding force for the organization’s motivation and direction. 

Mission3 is a solution-focused medical education non-profit organization, founded to advance the development of technology-based approaches to providing feedback, evaluation, and faculty development to the medical education community.    

The first offering from Mission3 is a web-based tool called the M3App (for Mobile Medical Milestones). The M3App is designed to facilitate the collection of direct observations of knowledge, skills, actions, and behaviors of an individual learner in the assessment of their achievement of the ACGME Milestones. The tool, which can be accessed from any computer, tablet or smartphone with an internet connection, quickly allows the user to document specific observations, and then prompts tagging of the observation by specific Milestones. Powerful reporting functions then allow for the development of a portfolio of observations that, over time, becomes an accurate and specific reflection of a learner’s individual professional development. Initially piloted in eight Family Medicine residency programs in North Carolina, the M3App is now being disseminated nationally, and Mission3 was founded as a non-profit organization to facilitate that expansion. 

The second offering from Mission3 is a sister web-based tool called the F3App (for Faculty Feedback Facilitator). The F3App is designed to facilitate the collection of direct observations of teaching behaviors of faculty by their learners (residents and medical students.) This new tool will be available to all specialties in August 2017.

While the M3App, F3App and related faculty development materials are the primary products of Mission3 at this time, the organization seeks opportunities to innovate further – our vision is that through Motivation and Mentoring of both learners and teachers, our products will Matter, ultimately making a difference and contributing to the greater good in medical education and the betterment of our national medical care delivery system.

Mission3 aspires to continue to develop new solutions to the emerging challenges of adapting medical education to an outcomes-based model. As medical education moves from a passive learning model in which our learners simply receive instruction (a process-oriented approach) to outcome-oriented active learning models in which learners must demonstrate competence, new evaluation methodologies must be developed, and new systems created to document the journey that ultimately leads a physician to practice without supervision. These new systems will require extensive faculty development, mentoring our learners, and innovative approaches, all of which Mission3 has the capacity to develop and disseminate. 

Further, creating systems that foster the pipeline of medical students and resident physicians toward careers in Family Medicine and other disciplines of primary care, with the drive and commitment to serve their communities, are, we believe, in the best interests of our society. Through the betterment of our medical educational systems, and creation of innovative programs to nurture that pipeline, Mission3 aims to develop solutions that are founded on a commitment to contribute to the greater good.