Social accountability is an important mandate for many medical schools in addressing the health needs of the diverse populations that they serve, including the geographically rural and remote communities. The distributed medical education model makes significant contributions to the social mandate by proactively and positively modifying both educational and non-educational factors. The experience of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, one of the largest distributed medical programmes in North America, is an exemplar of best practice to illustrate how this can be accomplished. This multi-faceted approach involves collaboration and partnership among the relevant interested parties, including academic institutions, government, health authorities, medical association, and communities at large to maximize the positive impacts of distributed medical education in transforming health for everyone.