Dr. Ian Madom, CEO and Co-Founder of Mocingbird had the chance to sit down with our partner StartUp Health for a Moonshot Moment interview while at VIVE 2022. 

The healthcare industry adapted the concept of Quadruple Aims in 2014, which includes: reducing costs, improving population health, patient experience, and clinician/provider team well-being and productivity. We believe that improving the provider experience will ultimately lead to better outcomes and happier patients.

Here’s a quick recap of the Q&A from the interview:

The inspiration behind Mocingbird.

The inspiration for starting Mocingbird was to help improve the lives of clinicians. Dr. Ian Madom, Orthopedic Spine Surgeon, CEO, and Co-Founder of Mocingbird, and Co-Founder Dr. George Fernaine, interventional cardiologist,  identified the pain point of not having the tools to manage all the non-clinical work that exists that continues to grow in healthcare. There’s no infrastructure to help us [clinicinas] get things done that have nothing really to do with taking care of the patient.

What is Mocingbird?

Mocingbird is a software as a service platform for both clinicians and administrators. We deliver a rules engine that manages all of the clinicians’ credentials and matches up the education that they need. So they’re [clinicians] are getting the right education at the right place at the right time. Mocingbird is essentially a compliance platform, but we want to move beyond that. Our motivation here is to change continuing education from a box-checking activity to something more impactful, something that actually improves the performance of clinicians and ultimately improves patient outcomes. 

What are some things that Mocingbird is working on right now?

Mocingbird is out getting people on the platform. We are currently out in the market and have been very successful in the digital health space. This seems to be where the need is most acute right now. In a post-pandemic world, with the growth of digital health, with the growth of telemedicine services, more healthcare providers are obtaining multiple state licenses. They have multiple credentials already. Now those requirements are becoming so onerous and so overwhelming to them. They need a platform that manages it. Not only that, the rules keep changing all the time. There’s no way for somebody who spends their day taking care of patients to then carve out time to figure out what they need to do to continue to take care of patients. So we have been pursuing the digital health space. We are starting to move more into that education space where we can deliver education that’s more impactful to people. What do people want to learn? Not just checking a box of the education I have to do, but what are the things I want to do? And ultimately, what are the things I don’t even realize I need to know and deliver them that education before they even realize they need it. 

What are Mocingbird’s plans for the future?

Our plans right now are to scale the platform primarily in the credential compliance space, but then build education tools that lay on top of that platform to deliver it directly to clinicians. We are focusing on the healthcare professionals' experience. There are lots of platforms out in the marketplace right now that are trying to improve healthcare for the patient. We believe that improving the provider experience will ultimately lead to better outcomes and happier patients. Our focus is the professional, the provider, and that goes from everything on how we deliver the platform, the UI UX, to the content that we deliver. We don’t create content, but we filter it to meet the needs of our users, and we’re so intimately in touch with them that we feel that we can do the best job at that. 

One story that is particularly important to me in our journey to express is the resistance that we’re meeting something from the organizations that continue to say, “this is a clinician’s problem, this is the healthcare provider’s problem.” That doesn’t sit well with me, that doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t fit with what we’re seeing in the media - talking about the great resignation. It also doesn’t fit with the ultimate goal of those organizations, which is to deliver great care. We want to roll in the same direction, but we’re currently not. 

It has been on more than one occasion, one in particular that I have in mind, where we have been told “this is the doctor’s problem, this is not our problem.” To me, that falls very flat. We deliver the platform, we are working with organizations that do believe in what we’re trying to deliver to clinicians, they come back and say, “we don’t know how we did this process without Mocingbird because it makes things so easy and efficient for us,” and ultimately that’s the goal. To change the efficiency of the continuing education space- so we’re bringing more value. 
We’re changing what people expect out of it, which is to get better at their jobs. Covid has changed the continuing education space to bring digital education increase in popularity. I believe now that things are starting to open up a little bit more, people do want to get back to those live events, and we’re working with continuing education providers to offer that to our users. But people still want the digital experience. But even more than that, people are starting to realize that sitting on a 30-minute/one-hour webinar is not very efficient. Why can’t I have the right education in five-minute snippets? Why can’t I do this while I’m seeing my patients during the day? Getting the education I need in real-time, and the tools just don’t exist to do that. In the United States healthcare, we are delivering continuing education that was developed 30 years ago to meet the needs of a healthcare system that was 30 years ago. We are not doing anything different in 2022, and that doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Mocingbird is a cloud-based platform that improves medicine and clinician well-being by eliminating the chaos of ongoing credentialing and delivering high-impact Continuing Medical Education. For individual clinicians, we develop a one-stop solution to validate, track, document, and calculate the CME requirements for the maintenance of their professional licenses. For healthcare organizations, we provide a management tool that offers a real-time overview of compliance for risk mitigation. Mocingbird is based in Rhode Island and was founded by Orthopedic Spine Surgeon, Dr. Ian Madom and Interventional Cardiologist, Dr. George Fernaine.