Our Board of Directors is composed of physicians and educators, and we rely entirely on charitable contributions for funding our many projects. Site visits by MEI’s volunteer medical professionals enable us to determine what resources are truly needed and would be most practical and useful in the local environment. MEI's site visits  and personal relationships with health care providers and administrators in the developing world are the key to its core strategy of providing resources which are of immediate benefit to health care providers and their patients in the target environment. MEI's approach prevents the all-too-common scenarios in which donated resources are under-utilized due to lack of true need or clinical appropriateness for the target environment, lack of on-site technical skill or familiarity with use of the equipment, inability to maintain equipment in the local environment, or diversion from the intended recipient.

Our volunteers obtain and transport key educational materials and needed medical supplies and equipment to venues where such resources can make a huge difference. In addition to providing local health care professionals with the medications and tools they need to do their job, we place an emphasis on education both by teaching and by providing medical textbooks, journals, clinical monographs, and electronic media to colleagues in developing nations whose quest for knowledge may be impeded by financial, geographic, and/or political barriers.

MEI’s Health Care and Society educational travel programs promote valuable people-to-people contact among health care professionals and foster the exchange of knowledge and ideas. MEI is committed to building bridges between the U.S. and other medical communities. Our travel programs have also served as an entrée for individual health care professionals to create long-term relationships with colleagues in developing nations. We believe that there is no more universal humanitarian value to build upon than health care.