Mentoring platform lets faculty and trainees find support across specialties

A new report from IO Lab describes a mentoring platform that allows faculty and trainees to find potential mentors across a large academic health system. Published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, the pilot implementation examines how a searchable, self-directed service can support connections beyond a person’s immediate department. The first eighteen months brought 767 voluntary registrations.

The MESH Incubator developed the platform with radiology colleagues and the institution’s Center for Faculty Development. The team used a design-thinking process to define users’ needs, build the service and revise it through feedback. An initial group of ten participants tested an early version before its wider release.

Users create profiles and identify the subjects on which they can offer mentorship. A directory allows searches by specialty, research interests, faculty rank and mentoring needs. Messaging and private groups keep several parts of the process within one service. Registration is limited to approved institutions, while access works across devices without requiring a virtual private network.

The design gives mentees responsibility for identifying a suitable mentor. Someone seeking help with publishing, parenting or a career transition can look for experience relevant to that question. This approach also allows a mentor to describe several areas of expertise, making forms of support visible that a job title alone may not capture.

Registrants represented several career stages, with substantial participation from early-career faculty and trainees. Frequently selected areas of mentoring expertise included research publishing, work-life balance, women in medicine, education and leadership. Over approximately eighteen months, the platform recorded about 9,600 page views. Users accessed the mentoring directory 1,967 times.

These measures describe registration and use of the platform. They do not show how many lasting mentoring relationships formed or whether participants gained promotions, research funding or other career benefits. The report covers a single institutional deployment, and users chose whether to participate. Those features limit conclusions about effectiveness and how the service would perform elsewhere.

The pilot demonstrates a way to organize mentoring information and make it easier to search across a large institution. Further evaluation can examine the quality of matches, whether relationships continue and which groups remain underserved. Those outcomes will help establish how a digital service can contribute to the sustained personal support that effective mentorship requires.