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Tips from Travels and Pandemic Pivots
Robert Trevino, MD, PhD, Kameron Matthews, MD, JD, Aldean Landry, MD, MPH, and Brandi Freeman, MD, MS

Abstract: The Tour for Diversity in Medicine started in 2012 as a grassroots effort to bring content from pre-medical student conferences to students from across the country, meeting them in their own backyards. The organizational mission is to educate, inspire, and cultivate the diversification of the future healthcare workforce. In the 10 in-person bus tours covering 28 states and over 9000 miles of travelled distance, over 3600 high school, college, and post-baccalaureate students participated in workshops with 80% identifying as underrepresented in medicine. Mentors themselves are also all from minoritized backgrounds in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and podiatry with many different specialties covered. However, when the COVID pandemic started, in-person conferences stopped. The organization pivoted to synchronous virtual programming, partnering with academic institutions and national organizations to continue to develop high quality content, now with an even larger reach which includes pre-health students as well as health professions students. Additionally, the organization has leveraged social media platforms to continue to mentor students along their journeys into medicine. This article will detail tips and tricks from both the in-person and virtual experiences and how this can be used to strengthen programming for pathways, whether conducting single sessions or longitudinal curricular programming.

Keywords: underrepresented in medicine, health professions, conferences, social media

About the authors:

Robert Trevino, MD, PhD is a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH. He has shown a strong passion for education, including medical education & simulation, community advocacy & health disparities research, and physician workforce diversification. He is a mentor & researcher with Tour for Diversity in Medicine. Prior to medicine, he taught middle school science.

Kameron Matthews, MD, JD is a family medicine physician and currently the Chief Health Officer of Cityblock Health, a transformative, value-based healthcare provider for Medicaid, dually eligible and lower-income Medicare beneficiaries. She oversees all clinical operations across the entirety of the integrated care model virtually, in-home, and in community-based clinics, with modern, custom-built technology at the core. In a previous role, she was the Assistant Under Secretary for Health for Community Care in the Veterans Health Administration. She is the president and co-founder with the Tour for Diversity in Medicine.

Alden Landry, MD, MPH is an emergency medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, where he also serves as the Assistant Dean in the Officer for Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership. His research includes work on emergency department utilization trends, disparities in care and quality of care. He is the co-founder with the Tour for Diversity in Medicine.

Brandi Freeman, MD, MD is a general pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado and an Associate Professor at University Colorado School of Medicine, where she also serves as the Vice Cahir for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Department of Pediatrics. She is a health services researcher whose work includes developing strategies to improve communication between families and physician using mobile technology, developing approaches to improve diversity in the health professions and investigating best practices to help children thrive in early childhood. She is a mentor & researcher with Tour for Diversity in Medicine.

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