Background
This section provides an overview of the college of medicine and its context.
California Northstate University College of Medicine (CNUCOM) is a private medical school in Elk Grove, California, within the greater Sacramento region. Founded in 2015, the College of Medicine enrolls approximately 450 students and sits among seven colleges at California Northstate University, alongside pharmacy, dental medicine, health sciences, psychology, graduate studies, and nursing.
The College of Medicine was established in part to address California’s shortage of primary care physicians. That mission has guided its growth from the beginning.
In July 2025, CNUCOM received full accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.
The accreditation pathway began with preliminary status in 2015 and advanced to provisional status in 2019.
The college of medicine cited growth in curriculum development, clinical partnerships, and student outcomes.
CNU’s institutional accreditation with the WASC Senior College and University Commission remains in good standing, reaffirmed through 2033.
Challenges
As CNUCOM expanded, leadership sought to strengthen clinical education in ways that matched the pace of the program’s growth. Several obstacles shaped that effort.
- Psychiatry placement scarcity. Psychiatry is among the hardest clerkships in the country to staff. Roughly half of U.S. counties have no practicing psychiatrist. California programs compete for a limited pool of psychiatric preceptors concentrated in a handful of metropolitan areas, and that competition intensifies as regional medical school enrollment grows.
- Regional preceptor competition. The Sacramento region hosts multiple health professions programs drawing from the same clinical sites. Securing consistent placements across specialties requires either deep local relationships or access to preceptors beyond the immediate geography.
- Consistency across rotations. When students rotate through different sites with different preceptors, the depth and structure of the experience varies. Programs need every student to reach the same competencies regardless of where they are placed.
- Skill development between encounters. Clinical learning happens during patient encounters. What happens between them is largely unstructured. Students review material on their own, with varying discipline and varying results.
- Administrative load. Coordinating placements, verifying preceptors, and tracking evaluations consumes faculty and staff time that would otherwise go to teaching.
Solution
CNUCOM partnered with MomentMD in 2025 to integrate virtual clinical education across multiple specialties. The program began where the need was most acute and expanded from there.
Implementation was led in partnership with Ed Lee, MD, MPH, who served as Chair of Clinical Education and Director of Clinical Informatics at CNUCOM. Dr. Lee is also Chief Medical Officer at Nabla, the ambient AI documentation platform, and previously served as Executive Vice President of IT and Chief Information Officer for The Permanente Federation.
That combination mattered. Dr. Lee arrived with a working view of how health technology gets adopted inside real clinical systems, not a theoretical one, and applied it directly to how these rotations were designed. Programs frequently approach technology partnerships as procurement decisions. CNUCOM approached this one as a curriculum design question, with someone at the table who understood both sides.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Psychiatry as the entry point. The partnership opened with psychiatry, the specialty where placement scarcity was most limiting. MomentMD placed CNUCOM students with board certified psychiatric preceptors, removing the geographic constraint that governs local placement availability.
- AI personalized rotation frameworks. MomentMD’s AI engine builds each student’s rotation framework using the program’s own syllabus and student handbook. Rather than applying a generic structure, the platform aligns learning objectives, expectations, and assessment to what CNUCOM defines for its own students. Each rotation reflects the program that owns it.
- Structured skill development between encounters. Students use MomentMD’s AI clinical tools during the time between live patient encounters. That time becomes deliberate practice: working through clinical reasoning, documentation, and case preparation aligned to the objectives in their personalized framework.
- Continuous performance evaluation. The platform tracks student performance across the rotation, giving faculty visibility into progress and giving students feedback tied to defined competencies rather than impressions.
- Credentialing and documentation management. MomentMD handles preceptor verification, licensure tracking, and evaluation documentation, reducing the administrative load on CNUCOM faculty and staff.
Results
The partnership followed a deliberate sequence: prove the model, then scale it.
- Pilot completed December 2025. Four CNUCOM students completed the initial psychiatry pilot. The pilot validated the rotation structure, the preceptor match quality, and the AI framework before any broader commitment.
- Full launch April 2026. Following the pilot, CNUCOM launched the program at scale.
- 30 students placed in clerkships. Since launch, MomentMD has delivered clerkships to 30 CNUCOM students.
- Student ratings of 9 out of 10 or higher. Every student to date has rated their rotation at least 9 out of 10 overall. The evaluation instrument measures engagement, preceptor quality, rotation structure, and communication. No student has rated the experience below that threshold.
- Demand expanding into new specialties. The program has identified pediatrics and family medicine as the next areas of need, extending the model beyond its psychiatry starting point.
Lessons Learned
CNUCOM’s experience points to several takeaways for programs evaluating virtual clinical education.
- Start where the scarcity is greatest. Psychiatry was the right entry point because it was the hardest placement to secure. Leading with the most constrained specialty produces the clearest evidence of value.
- Informatics leadership changes the outcome. Having a clinical informatics leader inside the program, rather than only a placement coordinator, shaped how the technology was implemented. Someone who has deployed health technology at scale asks different questions during design, and those questions surface problems before students encounter them.
- Pilot before you scale. A four student pilot in December preceded a full launch in April. That sequence let both teams validate quality and refine the structure before committing an entire cohort.
- Personalization requires the program’s own materials. A rotation framework built from a syllabus and student handbook reflects what the program actually requires. Generic structures do not.
- Time between patients is instructional time. Structured AI supported practice between encounters converts unused schedule into skill development.
- Measure continuously, not retrospectively. Ongoing performance evaluation gives faculty visibility during the rotation rather than after it, when there is still time to intervene.
Conclusion
California Northstate University College of Medicine built its clinical education program deliberately, with evidence at each stage.
With CNUCOM, the MomentMD partnership began with a four-student pilot.
It scaled to 30 clerkships after the model proved out.
Now it is extending into pediatrics and family medicine.
Student ratings have held at 9 out of 10 or higher across every measured dimension. Evaluation continues as the program grows.