For Ian Madom, MD, healthcare was never an abstract concept. Raised in a household where one side of the family home doubled as his father’s pediatric practice, medicine shaped his worldview from the beginning.

“I’ve kind of been in healthcare for 49 years,” Madom says. “I was playing in the waiting room while my dad was seeing patients. It was always around me.”

That immersion eventually led him to become an orthopedic spine surgeon and, later, a founder. Like many clinicians, Madom grew accustomed to voicing frustration about inefficiencies in the system. But he also absorbed a defining lesson early on.

“One thing I learned from my dad was don’t complain unless you have a solution. If you see a problem, start fixing it.”

That mindset set the foundation for Mocingbird, which Dr. Madom co-founded with fellow physician George Fernaine, MD, after the two met during an executive MBA program. Their shared pain point was not clinical care, but everything surrounding it.

“At the end of the day, I just want to take care of people,” Dr. Madom says. “I want to be in the office seeing patients or in the operating room fixing their problem. I don’t want to be figuring out what I need to do just to be able to do that.”

For most clinicians, licensing and certification management is reactive by design. Requirements differ by state. Timelines vary. Rules change annually. Administrators often rely on spreadsheets and last-minute email reminders, sometimes surfacing urgent needs days before a deadline.

Dr. Madom remembers one moment clearly. “I was told, ‘It’s Friday of Memorial Day weekend. You have eight hours of opioid training due by Tuesday. Here are 40 websites you can check.’ That’s not education. That’s just paying a toll.”

Mocingbird reframes this process entirely. The platform centralizes credentials, tracks state-specific requirements, maps education to the correct renewal cycles, and notifies both clinicians and administrators well ahead of deadlines. The goal is not just compliance, but meaningful learning and less wasted time.

“Last-minute education doesn’t achieve the state’s intent,” Dr. Madom said. “People are just checking the box. We wanted to create a system that’s thoughtful, timely, and actually useful.”

What began as a clinician-first tool has expanded into infrastructure for healthcare organizations. Administrators now gain visibility into compliance across their entire workforce, reducing reliance on manual tracking and helping organizations stay audit-ready.

The rise of telehealth and virtual care has made multistate licensure a necessity rather than an exception. Behavioral health, in particular, has seen rapid growth across state lines, intensifying the complexity of compliance.

“Where the patient is matters,” Dr. Madom explains. “State licensure exists to protect patients, and every state has its own standards. That’s not going away.”

Instead of fighting that reality, Mocingbird works within it. The platform supports clinicians practicing in multiple states and integrates closely with the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, helping organizations expand access without compromising regulatory integrity.

“It’s become easier to hold multiple state licenses because of a system like this,” Dr. Madom says. “That means bigger outreach, more access for patients, and smoother clinical operations.”

While artificial intelligence is reshaping healthcare headlines, Dr. Madom takes a grounded view. AI, he believes, is most powerful when paired with structure and accountability.

“Large language models are great when you point them at exactly what they need to look at,” he says. “If you just let them scour the internet, you’re going to get bad information.”

At Mocingbird, AI tools operate behind the scenes to retrieve and monitor regulatory data, then return it in a controlled environment where humans add context and judgment. The result is insight clinicians and administrators can trust.

Balancing surgery, leadership, and company building is not easy. Dr. Madom describes the doctorpreneur path as hard but rewarding, filled with opposing forces that shift day to day.

“There are days you ask, why am I doing this?” he says. “And other days you say, this is exactly why.”

A key source of momentum has been community. As a StartUp Health community member, Dr. Madom credits the network with providing long-term support and visibility as Mocingbird grew.

“You’ve been an incredible partner over the years,” he said. “From events to podcasts to just being there, StartUp Health has supported companies like ours in changing the lifestyles of healthcare professionals and the patients we take care of.”

Mocingbird is preparing to launch a new end-to-end licensing platform designed specifically for administrators. With beta customers onboarding this spring and a broader release planned for early summer, the company aims to help health systems onboard clinicians faster and deploy them where care is needed most.

“We’re excited about helping organizations that can’t scale their teams fast enough on their own,” Dr. Madom says. “This is about getting clinicians in front of patients sooner.”

Sometimes the most powerful Health Moonshots are not the loudest. They are the systems that quietly remove friction, restore focus, and give clinicians back the time to do what they do best.