Navigate helps School of Medicine employees, including clinicians and faculty, streamline resources and communications that help students succeed.

The UNC School of Medicine rolled out Navigate, a one-stop shop for resources to support medical students, in fall 2020. The platform provides students with support resources from acceptance through graduation, including resources from student affairs, academic affairs and financial aid.
Navigate helps School of Medicine employees, including clinicians and faculty, streamline resources and communications that help students succeed.
“Making it as easy as possible for students to reach out and talk to their advisors and others when they need help, academically or with anything else in their lives, is incredibly important,” said Vinay C. Reddy, MD, assistant professor of family medicine and a college advisor. “From the student experience perspective, students have a streamlined ability to engage with the people who are supporting them through their path in medical school, and removing barriers to communication makes this a very helpful resource.”
The Navigate system is designed to improve student support by allowing advisors to act as primary care providers, and it delivers the benefit of improved record keeping and shared resource tracking. For example, Navigate stores student communications with their advisors and others within the platform. When a student schedules a meeting to discuss upcoming course registration, both the student and their advisor are able to review their past conversations within Navigate instead of tracking down notes from past meetings or searching for emails elsewhere.
“Today, so much of our communication with one another is through email, and prior to Navigate rolling out I would find myself searching through my inbox for correspondence with students. Now I can send information through Navigate and Navigate helps by keeping a record of my conversations,” said Georgette A. Dent, MD, associate dean for student affairs and associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine. “This is a great way for us to keep all the members of a student’s team connected – and it’s important to remember that our students have a team of people supporting them. To be able to efficiently communicate with everyone is a huge success for the Navigate platform.”
Students and employees can find more information about the platform, including frequently asked questions, online at https://www.med.unc.edu/it/services/student-systems-support/navigate/.