Continuing medical education (CME) is a vital yet often cumbersome aspect of a clinician's career. The time and effort required to maintain credentials can be overwhelming, detracting from patient care. In a recent conversation on Startup Health TV, Logan Plaster sat down with Stacy Harris, Chief Revenue Officer at Mocingbird, to discuss how Mocingbird is revolutionizing the CME landscape and supporting clinicians in managing their credentials more efficiently.

Check out the full interview.

Logan: Welcome to Startup Health TV where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and the innovators who are transforming health. I'm Logan Plaster here with my guest today, Stacy Harris, Chief Revenue Officer at Mocingbird. Stacy, great to see you.

Stacy: Thank you so much for having me. Nice to see you, Logan.

Logan: I love talking to people from Mocingbird, 'cause you're disrupting, you're improving continuing medical education. My father was a physician and I can remember the weekends that he spent doing his certification. It's one of those things not everyone thinks about, but whole weekends lost doing paperwork. He was certified in 10, 15 states. It was a nightmare, binders. So tell me what Mocingbird's doing and how that kind of changes the paradigm for folks like my dad.

Stacy: I love that you know that because that was absolutely the inspiration for Mocingbird. Dr. Ian Madama and Dr. George Fernay, our two co-founders, were like your dad, very frustrated with this necessary and important part of their career that had to fall on their personal time.

Logan: I just want to dial it back a minute to say something that I find fascinating is how much time and education and money goes into becoming a clinician and how important all those credentials are and we forget that, right? We all go to college, we get a degree, maybe we put it on the wall, that's it. But these clinicians, they have to bring it up to every single job they get, everything they have. So Mocingbird's helping with a couple things. Mocingbird is helping keep all that in one place owned by the clinician first and foremost, because they're really important. Who touches them? Really important. The trust that's around it, super valuable. We want to know where that information is at all times, but we don't want to think about it. The clinician shouldn't have to think about that instead of thinking about patient care. So getting that clutter, if you will, out of your mind, but in one place. So Mocingbird does that in the file cabinet, but then it's also making the required learning that everybody has relevant. So get out of the way the required learning, that state mandated specific course, and you know you've hit those things that are the nuanced compliance issues so that the rest of your learning is relevant to your career, to your patients, to your life, to your continuing practice.

Logan: So I hear a lot of complaints from physicians about, "Oh, I got to go do this compliance thing again. I already know that work," so for them sometimes it seems like it's just busy work, when there's actually important things for them to get on.

Stacy: Absolutely.

Logan: Educate us on how continuing medical education is shifting and changing. I mean, it seems like it's not the same as it was, you know, the story of my father's from 15 years ago. What does CME look like today that kind of necessitates a digital platform?

Stacy: I love it. Well, CME is changing because there's technology for all of this, right? You're younger than I am, but when your dad started, there were still books, and you'd go to seminars, and maybe we're going to go to Maui.

Logan: That's right, that's right.

Stacy: Right, that was the perk. But today, the world's moving faster. You have all of this information. Every day there's a new diagnosis. There are new clinical innovations out there. So to be kept up to breath and know what you have to do and then also try to fit in everything else you want to do, it's really challenging. So we're seeing a lot more digital information. We're seeing education that's happening actually at the site of care, and really figuring out how to make credit around that. It's no longer just reading something that was published. I learned in this case real time, and that's what Ian Madama and George say all the time, having the right information at the right time is really a goal, and one of our moonshots, is to ultimately really change the way that you are getting educated, because it's not necessarily on a weekend over Memorial Day that you just take in eight hours and absorb it, it's a constant learning curve.

Logan: And sometimes that trip out to Maui was mostly vacation and just kind of checking some boxes when really you needed a refresher.

Stacy: Totally.

Logan: This also reminds me of the role that telemedicine plays here, because now if I'm a doctor and I'm in Delaware, I want to be able to do telemedicine in California and not, or all 50 states.

Stacy: Correct.

Logan: So how does that play in?

Stacy: In a huge way. So I consider Mocingbird the necessary back-end infrastructure to support the front-end of telehealth. We spent billions of dollars on the screens and all of the technology for the patient to meet their caregiver, but if we are not supporting the back-end to support the clinicians who are doing this in all of these other places, what's going to happen?

Logan: Yeah.

Stacy: So Mocingbird is allowing that because each state and each additional license has requirements that they might not know they needed. So again, get out of the way what you need because that's what keeps you compliant. But my favorite part is we're having a struggle of keeping clinicians. Med schools are now offering free medical school. We saw two schools in New York just come out because it's hard to get people to commit to this.

Logan: We had two specialties not match, not fill the match.

Stacy: Super hard, right? And what I also think is crazy is we're having more diseases, we're finding out more cures. So what if we don't have the people there to give the treatment? We don't need clinicians retiring any earlier. In fact, we need this original crop of clinicians training the next generation, mentoring the next generation. And things like telehealth, letting a clinician say, okay, fine, I'm slowing down, but I'm going to go spend summers in Colorado with my grandchildren. They can get a license there. They can see patients there. We don't lose them out of the workforce and they're there for the next generation.

Logan: Now remind me, maybe you know, like where are we at in terms of interstate licensing? I know during COVID they opened it up. Is it easier now to get licensed in multiple states?

Stacy: It is easier and we have wonderful tools like the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, the IMLC. They're helping streamline it but it is still a state by state.

Logan: Okay, still is.

Stacy: The states want their autonomy. And the reason, which is really very profound and important to me, is each state is holding on to the actual regulations because they are tasked with the public safety of their own state and our citizens. So they're making it streamlined, but I don't see it ever becoming too easy. But the reciprocity is there, so they're starting to say, "Hey, I'm gonna trust you if you have a Texas license. Texas is going to state speak as your state of principal licensure to let Minnesota know that, hey, you're a good doctor and good standing." But the states are still going to own it because the citizens of their own state are what they're watching.

Logan: You don't see it going the direction of like the common essay for college graduates because back when, you know, I had to do a new essay for every college. I see it. Now there's a common application for...

Stacy: We can hope that maybe there'll be a common application but I still think that the oversight will still remain within each state as we watch all state law.

Logan: Interesting, interesting. What are you most excited about as to what Mocingbird's working on in the next 12 months?

Stacy: I don't think I can fill it in on the air time. We are doing so many wonderful things. First and foremost, we're finding that health systems, in addition to CME and tracking, they have other educational requirements. It might be fire safety training. So we're finding that custom trackers are important to streamline information for the clinicians. So we're getting into some custom trackers.

Logan: I'm sorry, what's a custom tracker?

Stacy: Custom tracker would be, instead of just tracking CME or state licensure due dates, it would also be anything else that has a deadline or requirement for an employer. So we're able to even make it a more robust tool for the clinicians and the administrators. We are also separating the fabulous patented rules engine that supplies all of Mocingbird's technology, and that's becoming a white-labeled separate entity, so we're going to be able to actually just sell the rules engine, and people can track. So it could be a CME company that's already doing all their own CME, but they want to offer some additional features. And then we're expanding our user types, so behavioral health, I think if we've seen anything in the telehealth space really stick on what's working, is Zoom behavioral health, Zoom therapists. So we are now finished with LCSWs in 50 states and tackling all the rest of those clinician types.

Logan: Okay, okay. What kind of reaction are you seeing? We're here at a conference, you know, from potential partners. How excited are they about this kind of technology?

Stacy: Really excited. And I think the timing, we were almost a little bit early when we first hit it.

Logan: Always challenging.

Stacy: And people, the last three years, we had to get the license. They had to get the license to practice medicine in the state, but now they have to maintain the license. They have to support it. So they're panicking. That first year, usually you don't have any CME due, but now they have it coming due for 10 plus licenses. CME tools, here comes Mocingbird.

Logan: Okay, interesting, interesting. What are you excited about in terms of features, things that maybe you're rolling out soon?

Stacy: Yeah, we are finding that a lot of the clinicians really need to trust the people that handle their information. And so while they started with Mocingbird to come and do CME tracking with them now, hey, you guys have all the information that's needed to process the renewal. Can you help with that? Oh, what would it take from an education perspective to get licensed in two more states? So we're becoming sort of the source of truth on education and how it applies to licensure and then our fabulous team run by Sarah Bishop. I mean, we have experts with a combined 70 years now who've been in this space. So they're the ones that are on the phone. You're not getting a random person somewhere in the world. We're keeping it in-house, keeping it close, letting them know how important we know their credentials are to have attained and to maintain.

Logan: And your client is the hospital.

Stacy: That's our ultimate client, right?

Logan: Yeah.

Stacy: Anyone who employs clinicians.

Logan: Yeah.

Stacy: But we're also there for just an individual clinician who needs support.

Logan: Really?

Stacy: Mm-hmm.

Logan: Okay, okay.

Stacy: BTC can sign right on up.

Logan: Yeah, someone who wants to expand their certification across the United States and kind of see what other opportunities. My father was a Locum Tenens Emergency Physician there, so he wanted to find opportunities. More people are doing travel medicine.

Stacy: Absolutely.

Logan: No one requires even more maintenance.

Stacy: Yeah.

Logan: Stacy, I love how Mocingbird has grown and developed. It's great that I've gotten to track your success over the last few years, some interesting partnerships as you find those folks that really understand what you're, how you're augmenting what has been kind of a latent industry and take it to the next level. And I love that you have this sort of physician well-being angle as well because these folks are just burning out and leaving the specialty altogether and part of it is the back-end logistics.

Stacy: Absolutely.

Logan: So keep up the great work.

Stacy: Thank you so much.

Logan: All right, thanks for coming over.

Stacy: Great being here.

Logan: All right. Thank you.

At Mocingbird, we are dedicated to supporting clinicians by simplifying the management of their continuing medical education and licensing requirements. Our goal is to free up valuable time for healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on what truly matters—patient care. Stay tuned for more insights and innovations from Mocingbird as we continue to transform the landscape of CME and healthcare technology.

About Mocingbird

Mocingbird is a SaaS management platform dedicated to improving medicine and clinician well-being. Our comprehensive solution eliminates the chaos of ongoing credentialing and delivers high-impact Continuing Medical Education (CME). With Mocingbird, individual clinicians gain a convenient one-stop solution to validate, track, document, and calculate their CME requirements for professional license maintenance. Healthcare organizations benefit from a powerful management tool that provides a real-time compliance overview for effective risk mitigation. Founded by Interventional Cardiologist, Dr. George Fernaine, and Orthopedic Spine Surgeon and CEO, Dr. Ian Madom.