Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Access to medical education remains disproportionately limited for students from low-income households and groups underrepresented in medicine (URiM). Although many pipeline programs exist, no unifying, reproducible framework guides their development, implementation, or evaluation. To address this, the Linking Institutions and Neighborhoods for Knowledge in Medicine (LINK-Med) framework was developed as a four-phase stepwise model for building partnerships between medical schools, clinical institutions, and K–12 educational systems. LINK-Med was applied at Brown University during the 2023–2024 academic year through the Clinical Mentorship Program (CMP), a student-led initiative providing longitudinal mentorship and clinical exposure to high school students in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The program enrolled 27 high school students and was implemented using existing institutional resources without dedicated external funding. Application of LINK-Med enabled rapid partnership development and programming across a full academic year. Detailed program evaluation findings are reported separately. Future work will focus on expanding LINK-Med across additional sites, developing standardized evaluation instruments, and assessing long-term outcomes for participating students. LINK-Med offers a scalable, low-cost model for increasing access to early medical education. While pathway programs are increasingly recognized as essential for expanding access to medicine, yet institutions lack a blueprint for creating them. LINK-Med introduces a novel implementation framework and geographic feasibility metric that help medical schools build sustainable partnerships with hospitals and local schools. This scalable model transforms successful local initiatives into a reproducible approach for broader adoption.</p>