Certain things draw you to a new organization or a new role. For me, one of them was knowing that Aquifer is a mission-driven nonprofit. That mattered to me before I ever joined.
Aquifer’s mission is “to deliver the best health care education through collaborative development and research into innovative, high-impact virtual teaching and learning methods.” But what also stood out to me was how intentionally the organization is built around that purpose. Being a nonprofit wasn’t incidental. It was an intentional decision to structure our organization answering to learners and educators, not shareholders. Our offerings are developed by a Consortium of health professions educators, so the people closest to learners help shape what we create for them. Together, those choices reflect a commitment to creating meaningful learning experiences that help prepare the next generation of clinicians.
I understood those things when I joined Aquifer. But there is a difference between understanding something on paper and seeing all of its pieces come together in front of you. My first Wellspring, Aquifer’s annual gathering of our Educator Consortium, gave me that opportunity.
And as it happens, one of the first people to give me language for that experience was our plenary speaker, Nicole Woods, PhD.
Dr. Woods spoke about expertise, case-based learning, and what it means to develop knowledge in an age when information is increasingly abundant.
One of the key points of her plenary resonated with me: having access to information is not the same as having knowledge. Experts don’t simply know more. Their knowledge is structured differently. They develop connections—between the what and the why, between previous experiences and the problem in front of them—that allow them to reason and act.
That distinction feels especially important at a time when more information than ever is available at our fingertips. As AI makes it increasingly easy to retrieve an answer, the work of education isn’t simply helping learners acquire more information—or demonstrate that they can recall it. It is helping them construct the knowledge they need to understand when, why, and how to use it, and to develop the clinical reasoning that allows them to apply that knowledge when the answer isn’t obvious.
Dr. Woods also emphasized the importance of productive struggle—giving learners opportunities to predict, explain their reasoning, and commit to an answer before receiving support or feedback. In an age of AI, that raises an important question for educators: How do we use new tools to support learning without bypassing the thinking that helps build expertise?
As I thought about her words over the next several days, I realized I was having my own much smaller version of that experience. I had come to Aquifer knowing the individual facts about our nonprofit model, our Consortium, our pedagogy, and our purpose. At Wellspring, I got to see how those pieces connect.
Some of the most meaningful moments for me happened away from the main stage. I made my way into as many course board and affinity group meetings as I could, listening to educators from medicine, osteopathic medicine, physician assistant, and nurse practitioner education discuss their learners, their disciplines, and the challenges they see ahead.
At one point, I walked into a meeting of our Clinical Excellence Board. Throughout the room, smaller groups were gathered around tables, deeply engaged in a project they were developing together. These educators came from different parts of the country, different professions, different institutions, and different educational environments. Their learners have different needs, and their programs face different pressures.
But looking around the room, you couldn’t detect those distinctions. I saw people fully invested in the same problem—challenging one another, contributing their particular expertise, and considering how the work could serve learners across health professions. MDs, DOs, PAs, and NPs were bringing different perspectives to the same challenge: how to create learning experiences that help their students become excellent clinicians.
I saw versions of that throughout Wellspring. Aquifer describes itself as "built by educators, for educators," but being in those rooms gave that phrase considerably more meaning for me. The Consortium isn't simply offering feedback on work created elsewhere. These educators are actively shaping it—bringing the challenges they see in their own learning environments to the table, working through solutions together, and helping ensure that what we create reflects what learners actually need.
Their experiences aren't just informing decisions from a distance; they're part of how the learning is developed, challenged, and improved. Seeing that level of ownership and collaboration gave me a much deeper appreciation for what it means to be a Consortium-built organization.
One of the course board conversations I was especially grateful to join was with our geriatrics educators. I wanted to listen to the unique challenges they are seeing and understand how we could help more programs and learners take advantage of the geriatrics education Aquifer offers.
What followed was a conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
The educators around that table shared some sobering context. According to the American Geriatrics Society, fewer than 7,000 geriatricians practice in the United States.1 Meanwhile, U.S. Census Bureau projections estimate that adults 65 and older made up 18.9% of the population in 2025, a share projected to reach 23.4% by 2060.2
The need, of course, extends far beyond the geriatrics specialty. Older adults receive care throughout our healthcare system, which means clinicians across disciplines need the knowledge and skills to care for them well. That need is reflected in updated competencies published in Academic Medicine in 2025. The authors describe geriatrics education as a “critical need for every doctor-in-training” and identify the knowledge and skills graduating medical students need to provide age-friendly care.3
What struck me wasn’t a lack of evidence that this learning matters. It was the disconnect between that need and the challenges these educators described in getting geriatrics education in front of more learners. I remember sitting there thinking: Wait. How can that be? We know our population is aging. We know there aren’t enough geriatricians to meet that need alone. We know clinicians across disciplines will care for older adults throughout their careers. So why is it so difficult to ensure this learning reaches the people who will need it?
As a daughter of aging parents, I couldn’t hear that conversation only as someone who works at Aquifer. I heard it as a patient and family member, too. And once the conversation became personal, my next thought came pretty quickly: What can we do about it?
That conversation helped me recognize a subtle but important change in the way I think about Aquifer.
I've often described our work as helping develop the next generation of great clinicians. And that's true. But sitting with those geriatrics educators helped me see the larger purpose more clearly: we're preparing clinicians so that patients—our parents, our families, our communities, and even ourselves—receive better care.
Health professions education operates inside a complicated system of requirements, assessments, accreditation standards, curricular pressures, and limited time. Those structures matter, and many exist for good reasons. But they also influence what gets attention.
Leslie Fall, MD, explored one example recently in The Cost of Studying for the Wrong Test, asking what happens when the incentives surrounding learners encourage them to optimize for exam performance while the slower, harder work of developing clinical judgment competes for their attention.
The Geriatrics Course Board conversation made me think about that tension from another angle. What do patients need future clinicians to know? And how do we make sure those needs remain visible when educators are faced with so many competing demands for limited curricular time?
Those questions are where Aquifer’s structure matters. As a nonprofit, our mission is our North Star. As a Consortium-built organization, we have educators across disciplines and professions continually bringing forward what they are seeing in their classrooms, clinical environments, and fields. And because those educators are directly involved in creating and evolving our learning, their expertise doesn’t have to stop at identifying a problem; it can help shape what we do about it.
For me, that is an important part of what makes Aquifer unique. The nonprofit model, the Consortium, the pedagogy, and the technology aren’t separate characteristics of the organization. They reinforce one another in service of the same goal—and that goal ultimately leads back to the patient.
I went to my first Wellspring already knowing why Aquifer had appealed to me as a place to work. I came home with a much richer understanding of what it means to be part of an organization built around a mission.
I saw it in educators from different health professions sitting around the same table, bringing different perspectives to a shared challenge. I heard it in conversations about how we embrace emerging technology without removing the productive struggle learners need to develop expertise. And I felt it especially strongly sitting with a group of educators advocating for learning they know matters because they understand the patients future clinicians will be asked to care for.
The learners working through cases today will become the clinicians caring for our communities, our families, and us. Keeping those future patients at the center of the work is what connects the individual pieces for me now.
I knew Aquifer’s mission before Wellspring. I came home understanding what it feels like when a community of people is truly anchored in it.
¹ American Geriatrics Society. (n.d.). Why geriatrics. Retrieved October 13, 2026, from https://www.americangeriatrics.org/geriatrics-profession/why-geriatrics
² Sen, M., & Bacon, R. J. (2026, September 3). By 2060, U.S. population will be younger than almost half the world’s countries despite continued growth of older adults. U.S. Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2026/09/an-aging-world.html
³ Schwartz, A. W., Sehgal, M., Dawson, C. M. P., Granville, L. J., Powers, B. B., Shah, A. A., Sullivan, A. M., & Leipzig, R. M. (2025). Updated geriatrics competencies for graduating medical students: Training physicians to provide age-friendly care. Academic Medicine, 100(5), 592–599. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000005958