Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

“We are looking for great partners who are looking to innovate,” says Liam Woodard, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Whitecoat Learning Platform.

It’s a Nashville-based start-up that officially launched at the beginning of 2025 with an initial focus of the healthcare sector – specifically advanced practice, nursing, and physical therapy – although other non-healthcare sectors could be added later.

The platform benefits both students and those who are teaching them.

“As a student, I can see it (my assessment) in real-time,” Woodard explains, adding that instructors can also provide real-time, actional feedback through entrustable professional activity (EPA) assessments.

Woodard co-founded Whitecoat with Craig Myers, a Cleveland, OH-based Clinician who serves as the start-up’s Chief Strategy and Clinical Design Officer. Jeff Pate, PYA’s Chief Business Development Officer, is one of the company’s Strategic Advisors.

“We offer a single source for everyone involved in the clinical learning journey. We bring it into a single ecosystem,” Woodard explains.

The start-up touts that the company has redesigned how students, educators, and healthcare professionals collaborate leveraging a single solution to manage clinical rotations, log in-person encounters, identify students “at-risk,” recruit and minimize staffing shortages, provide constructive evidence-based remediation, and analyze student performance through competency and entrustment-based performance data.

The Whitecoat Learning Platform empowers students to quickly and easily gather the feedback they need while on clinical rotation without burdening preceptors/clinical instructors with countless assessment requests in their inboxes. Then, instructors can now offer entrustment-based feedback in the moment with just a few simple clicks, right from their phone, all without logging in.

In other words, it’s the proverbial “win-win” for educational providers and their students.

Woodard adds that the platform is easy-to-use, intelligent, evidence-based, and data driven.

In less than two months since launching, he says the Whitecoat Learning Platform has gained good traction. One example is a recent announcement by Launch Tennessee that the “InvestTN” has invested in the company, one of 32 investments announced thus far. Another potential opportunity is the apprentice space, specifically assessing an individual’s readiness to go to work.

Woodard recently made a presentation to a prospective client where he cited data that came from more than 5,000 nursing and clinical students who completed a clinical rotation in 2023. The results of the survey were insightful and illustrate the importance of the product Whitecoat is offering.

1. Seventy-five percent were not recruited by the organization where they completed a rotation.
2. Seventy-four percent did not have a job lined up post-graduate at the time of their rotation.
3. Sixty-two percent would be highly likely to accept a job where they completed their clinical rotation.
4. Eighteen percent of newly hired nurses quit their jobs within one year.
5. Thirty-three percent of nurses report thinking about leaving the field altogether or retiring.

“We have built the platform with an early focus to collect feedback from users,” Woodard says. “Now that we have gathered actionable insights, we are working at hyper speed to scale across healthcare disciplines.”

You can learn more about Whitecoat by viewing a promotional video here. Those interested in booking a demo can do so here.

---