In this episode of the Elevate Care Podcast, Nishan Sivathasan speaks with Brian McKillip, President of Locums at AMN Healthcare, about the future of healthcare workforce staffing and capacity optimization. They discuss the importance of strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, and the evolving landscape of healthcare staffing solutions. The conversation highlights the need for healthcare systems to adapt to changing demands and leverage data to improve operational efficiency and patient care.
In this episode of the Elevate Care Podcast, Nishan Sivathasan speaks with Brian McKillip, President of Locums at AMN Healthcare, about the future of healthcare workforce staffing and capacity optimization. They discuss the importance of strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, and the evolving landscape of healthcare staffing solutions. The conversation highlights the need for healthcare systems to adapt to changing demands and leverage data to improve operational efficiency and patient care.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Healthcare Innovation
02:04 Optimizing Capacity in Healthcare
04:51 Strategic Workforce Planning
09:54 Data-Driven Decision Making in Healthcare
12:57 Conclusion and Future Directions
About Brian
Brian is an outstanding addition to the AMN leadership team, bringing over 20 years of staffing industry experience, including roles specific to Locums at Weatherby/CHG. He currently oversees all sales for North America at Adecco. His proven success in building long-term client partnerships and delivering tailored solutions across healthcare, life sciences, and other specialized sectors will be invaluable as we continue to strengthen our Locums business.
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn
Nishan (00:00.214)
Welcome to the Elevate Care Podcast, the show where healthcare professionals, visionaries, and thought leaders come together to explore the limitless possibilities of healthcare innovation. I am Nishan Sivasathson, your host for today's episode, and I'm joined by Brian McKillip, president of Locums at AMN Healthcare. The topic that we will be discussing today is beyond workforce staffing, specifically optimizing capacity for healthcare's future. Thank you for joining us today, Brian.
Nishan, thank you, sir. I'm pleased to be here.
There. Awesome. Remind me, this is month four or five. Okay. Terrific. Well, as this is your first time in the Elevate Care Show, why don't you give folks a little bit of a background on yourself?
Yeah
Brian (00:45.678)
Thanks, absolutely. So I've been in staffing, let's see, 25 plus years. I hate to sort of say that, but it shows my age. In healthcare space specifically, about five years. It's interesting, my exposure there, coming from the commercial side of things. I have a different perspective. A lot of folks in healthcare staffing have sort of remained in healthcare staffing. So I like to think I can add some value, trust from some aspects that can contribute to-
The innovation sides, I think we're gonna talk a little bit about that today on the podcast of what we can do in healthcare. I've always found it fascinating because the demand has been so high in the healthcare space. There's not been a lot of impetus for change or innovation since obviously since COVID and some other aspects that jumped into it. But my background in large enterprise level global staffing firms historically add that level of value. And for those reasons, I'm excited to be at AMN. Obviously we have a
a contingency of labor, or I'm sorry, of leadership that allows us the space to explore. And I'm excited about that for those reasons.
Glad you're here. We're all excited that you're here at the organization and just really looking forward to picking your brain on our topic for today, which is focused on optimizing capacity for hospital and healthcare organizations.
I'm very passionate about this topic. Certainly, as we look at it, can just lots of opportunity to improve and our clients are clamoring for more involvement in that space.
Nishan (02:16.352)
Absolutely. you know, typically when it comes to patient population, health care systems know what to expect and how to plan for capacity. But then things change, right? Folks will clock in sick, they won't show up or all of sudden patient demand, there's an influx. What are you seeing from your perspective?
And we're seeing folks who want to become more strategic and planning for that, right? So how do you, there's the variability that you really can't plan for the folks that are sick, right? That aspect of it. But what are the things that you can control? And I look at the system wide sort of endeavor, right? You can get down for specialty or clinic or whatever it might be, but how do you look around the corner? And that's what they're asking for. How do we plan effectively? We understand
there's two essential facets to what we do collectively as workforce planners. It's how do you help our health systems make money? And how do you help them save money? And collectively, how do you bring that together? So they have the right visibility to that. And they have bits and pieces of it today, the Sean that they can understand panel sizes as an example, right? They understand their patient population in a given demographic, but they really don't know how to collectively bring it all together and understand
the spit out of what that is what the ROI contribution of services like that we can aim and can provide. That's ultimately what we're that they're asking for and we can help them support help support them with
Absolutely. it's, it's, you know, when you think about patient demand, patient volumes in managing the right level of flexibility across your staff and you have internal talent pools, you have external talent pools, you have internal agency, internal resource pools, and it's a lot, right? And then when you think about outside of internal external, you have short-term, medium and long-term labor options there too. So.
Nishan (04:11.256)
You know, as you've been out there, have you seen things that are clicking for healthcare executives today as they think about, you know, how to plan for their future workforce? Because it comes down to flexibility, right?
It absolutely is. And there's different, the complexities of health systems, there's the different stakeholders with different asks and things that drive their decision making. So you've got that complexity to it. But overarchingly, they're looking at how they can drive the ROI back to the ROI. Everything is tied to that. There's the clinical side of things, so better outcomes with better productivity from profitability.
and where the sweet spot for us is creating that visibility. again, the good news is that they're zeroing in, right? They're knowing which questions to ask, which six years ago, that wasn't really a sort of a thought. Again, they know panels and things of that nature, but they really weren't helping themselves. They were sort of just in the minutia of filling the voids.
Now they're thinking back and looking back at that time saying we sort of did ourselves a disservice and their understanding they have to plan more productively in the future.
Yeah, I completely agree. And actually, I'm actually seeing an increased interest in scheduling solutions, workforce planning solutions that are out there in the market, because there are folks who are wanting to be more dynamic with how they plan their labor, know, specifically optimizing costs for internal labor, and then looking at external labor options as needed. And if you look right now, the Delta, at least on the travel nurse side, pre pandemic, that Delta was about 15 to 18%.
Nishan (05:58.254)
And if you look in recent quarters, it's actually narrowed to about 11. So you're starting to see some of these other, know, at the peak of the pandemic, obviously it was not a desired option for many, for obvious reasons, because it was just very expensive. But, you know, with that being behind us now, I think you're seeing some normalization and, folks are exploring more options there. And so as you're trying to explore those more, they're...
more open to, hey, how do I sort of proactively manage this dynamic workforce to where you see flexibility in new and different ways, even outside of just contingent or perm. It's, do I offer a one hour shift to two or four? You see things such as virtual care coming into that equation as well too. with all those options also introduces a ton of complexity.
It does. the interesting thing around that is you mentioned like sort of the dynamic of number of individuals, but it's also the role types. always, I use a great example and maybe this sort of help frames it up. Say you have an anesthesiologist that's ending his life cycle of a physician, time to retire. And that's a big decision to make because from a physician standpoint,
we're seeing all kinds of data to backfill a physician, anesthesiologist could be up to $350,000 all in significant cost. And then the time to do that could be up to, I just spoke to a Midwest health health system yesterday, three years for a urologist to backfill that role permanently, right? So what do you do in that timeframe? And at anesthesiologist, there's options. Do you want to use CRNAs to help backfill that? Or do you want to use a locum tendon?
to help backfill that. You think about the upstream and downstream impacts of the type of role in the individuals that can fit in it. Do you leave it vacant? That's also an option, probably not one that they want to look at, but you have to understand the implications. If you don't have that anesthesiologist, how many surgeries get missed? Right? What's the cost there? What's the ROI on that? If you use the CRNAs, does that drive more revenue immediately because we have to fill that void? Can you bill your payers for the locum?
Brian (08:12.014)
Right? There's all of these attributes that go into the understanding the viability of which resource and when and which levers you pull to fill that void. That is what good looks like. Creating that map for that health system or down to the department to understand really what are my options and when do I need to go down those pathways. And that's the exciting thing for us. I think what we do, with the nursing side and the locum side,
That's becoming sort of table stakes, right? That's the foundational principles of what we're built on. And we're really darn good at that. But the next iteration is that true workforce planner, right? So that we're a full suite of services from all the way through from planning to the active fulfillment of those roles.
No, that's terrific. And I think, you know, AMN, specifically your group is uniquely positioned in the physician space because you offer both perm as well as locum. that's right. When you are engaging with these hospital healthcare systems, you're effectively able to provide a whole house solution, right? To your point, say, Hey, what do really need? And then here's how we can work with you. Is that, does that sound fair?
that's more than fair. It's a fun conversation to have because we know ultimately, for the most cases, health systems want to have their own physicians. But there is that gap and they need to understand the time to fill, the cost to fill. So we can offer that wide range to allow that to happen more organically and seamlessly. We're not sort of navigating them down one channel, right? So we can have a pragmatic conversation of what looks best for the client. To have that offering,
from everything from a locum to a perm to an interim. Whatever the solution might be within that space, we have the ability to have that conversation and help guide them in their journey.
Nishan (10:05.132)
That's terrific. So let's talk strategy for a bit. So, you know, what steps can C-suite leaders take in today's world to start planning for that flexibility for their workforce going forward?
It's mostly driven on data, no surprises there. And again, most health systems have a lot of that. It's a bit disparate, to be fair, right? They're not thinking about it the way we just sort of outlined it, understanding how to bring it all collectively together. But having access to that data, I mean, we, as you know, Deshaun, we have an entire team that focuses on optimization. That's all they do day in and day out, right? So the way we would position it strategically is to walk in side by side with those stakeholders.
and understand how to map out what good looks like for them, right? We would walk in there and say, here's how we would build out a whiteboard session. We'd do it virtually via dashboards, of course. But we have a team that would sort of parachute in and do that data analysis, taking their information, their data, taking what we have with our huge skill sets and data lakes of information to help bring together collectively and be a prescriptive modeling of what that is. But that that takes a lot of collaboration.
between a willing partner to make that happen with a collection of their data. Then we'd sit down and we would, I mean, here's what's awesome is that with AI, we have the ability to create a living breathing dashboard where a CFO or a COO can go in and plug and play. Where do I take that anesthesiologist out and drop in three CRNAs and see based on the data, understanding what their budget aspirations are.
knowing their true costs and the calculations between all of the different metrics that go involved, you'll understand what the viability is based on that. So you can plug and play within a real time scenario based on all the data sets that we bring forth with
Nishan (11:57.39)
That's terrific. sounds like a real game changer and you know, as labor is effectively what north of 50 % of operating costs for most hospital healthcare systems, I'm sure it's a very attractive solution.
It's not going away. Obviously, the economic pressures that we're facing, everything from tariffs to the insurance situations that we're feeling, this is only going to become more prevalent. We have to evolve. We have to help our clients in a more robust way. And this is the future of how we do that.
Yeah, I mean, even the conversations I'm having, this is sort of at the forefront. It's helped me plan, helped me orchestrate what needs to sit where and when, and just helped me understand the options that I have, right? Partner with me through it. To your point, it starts with data, and it's always easy to spit out the data, but then it's like, okay, help me operationalize this is sort of where I think the bigger opportunity is for these systems, because it's one thing to have the data, it's another thing to go execute on the plan.
Yeah, that's the biggest component, right? It's to ensuring that we have the proper project management organization in place to take that data and make it meaningful. And that's where the largest challenge in most systems are. They see today. A lot of systems are going down this pathway as well, right? So I'm not saying we're doing something that's wholly unique, but it's sort of compartmentalized, as I mentioned previously. But where we differentiate
is our knowledge base and making this come to reality. We've got those teams that are sort of green berets in this space. They understand how to take that data and make it, making it have a meaningful impact to them. And that is a huge differentiation for us competitively within AMN, but also to our clients, right? To allow them to have a seamless engagement with AMN, right? To understand that we've got this full suite of services and this is just the first part of it.
Brian (13:52.59)
to allow them to understand how to map out what good looks like.
Absolutely. Well, thank you for joining us here today, Brian. Enjoy the conversation and dialogue and look forward to working with you to make much of this real for our clients in the healthcare space.
I look forward to it as well. Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate the conversation dialogue.
Thank you for joining us on the Elevate Care Podcast. My name's Nishant Savathisian and we'll see you next time.
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