In this special live audience episode of Elevate Care, Kerry Perez is joined by Meredith LaPointe and Pat McCall to tackle the pressing workforce challenges in healthcare. Recorded live at the Rethink Client Summit in October 2024, this discussion explores how technology can create a seamless experience for both healthcare providers and patients. They also dive into the concept of vendor neutrality in staffing solutions and examine workforce trends shaping the future of healthcare.
In this special live audience episode of Elevate Care, Kerry Perez is joined by Meredith LaPointe and Pat McCall to tackle the pressing workforce challenges in healthcare. Recorded live at the Rethink Client Summit in October 2024, this discussion explores how technology can create a seamless experience for both healthcare providers and patients. They also dive into the concept of vendor neutrality in staffing solutions and examine workforce trends shaping the future of healthcare.
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Workforce Challenges in Healthcare
02:25 Understanding a Balanced Workforce
04:42 Key Enablers for Workforce Balance
06:39 Technology's Role in Workforce Management
09:28 Vendor Neutrality in Staffing Solutions
12:15 Trends in Healthcare Workforce Management
15:01 Future of Workforce Solutions in Healthcare
About Meredith
Meredith Lapointe is the Chief Business Officer for AMN Healthcare and is responsible for the organization’s corporate growth strategy, enterprise client management including MSP accounts, marketing, communications, clinical support, and workforce analytics business. Previously, Ms. Lapointe worked as a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she served healthcare companies for nearly two decades – ranging from national and regional health systems, academic medical centers, integrated delivery networks, healthcare service organizations, and smaller provider networks – in transforming capabilities and operational performance. She helped organizations create dynamic, high performing workforces to meet the needs of patients and healthcare systems.
Ms. Lapointe holds a Bachelor of Arts in Engineering and Studio Art from Dartmouth College, a Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business. Ms. Lapointe is passionate about STEAM education and has served on the board of a children’s theater organization. She enjoys volunteering at her county’s food bank and in the local school district.
About Patrick
Patrick McCall is the Chief Growth Officer of AMN Healthcare and is responsible for leading enterprise sales and implementation functions, ensuring alignment across the business. Mr. McCall is a seasoned executive with over 25 years of experience in sales and operations and has held senior executive roles in several Fortune 500 organizations. He has a proven track record in growth acceleration and has been recognized by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) as one of the industry’s most influential leaders.
Mr. McCall most recently served as Chief Revenue Officer at People2.0, where he utilized his extensive experience leading sales organizations on an international level. Before his time with People2.0, Mr. McCall worked as Global Chief Sales Officer at Randstad, a leading global talent organization and valued strategic partner to AMN Healthcare. Mr. McCall holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from North Carolina State University, and he fundraises for the American Cancer Society and the Alzheimer’s Association through cycling events.
About Kerry
Kerry Perez leads the design and development of enterprise strategy in addition to overseeing Marketing, Corporate Communications, and Creative Services. Ms. Perez joined AMN Healthcare in 2007 and has held various roles during her tenure, including recruitment, marketing, innovation, strategy, and M&A. She most recently served as the company’s Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. She also stood up AMN Healthcare's Diligence and Integration Management Office, which led the strategic and functional integration of new acquisitions to drive synergy. She was named among Staffing Industry Analyst’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2021, and she hosts the AMN Healthcare podcast, Elevate Care.
Ms. Perez maintains the guiding principles of being customer obsessed, thinking big and delivering results. She has a passion for mentoring emerging leaders and building effective teams. Ms. Perez holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of California at Santa Barbara. For more than four years, she has served on the board of Dallas-based nonprofit, CitySquare, which focuses on fighting the causes and effects of poverty.
Connect with Kerry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrycperez/
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (00:00.318)
Welcome to Elevate Care. We are recording in front of our first ever live audience right here in Dallas, Texas for our Rethink Client Summit. We are really excited here to talk with Meredith LaPointe, our Chief Business Officer and Pat McCall, Chief Growth Officer. We're talking all things healthcare, but particularly today, we're going to be focusing on solutions for workforce challenges, in particular with planning and flexibility. Pat and Meredith, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Awesome. Okay, let's start with actually rethinking how we do introductions. Meredith, tell me a little bit more about your why. Why are you in healthcare? Why are you with AMM? It's an important question, an important one to ask every day. Many of us stay in this industry because there's such a deeper purpose. For me, one of the driving motivators is just making healthcare better every day. I think it's a travesty that you can walk into one setting of care, one hospital, one place.
and potentially where you walked in could dictate the outcome that you walk out with. I don't want that to be the case. I want it to be best chance of having a fantastic outcome, meeting amazing caregivers, having access to quality regardless of where you step in. And that's really one of the things that motivates me. And I worked for a couple of decades in healthcare consulting and moved over to AMN because I saw a company with all of these pieces that enabled the right people to be.
in all of those places when they're mostly needed, when they are needed the most. So that really drives me and makes me very proud to work here. Thanks, Meredith. Pat, same question. I would say, you know, from my perspective, you've got, you know, my career has been around human capital and human capital tech and getting people jobs is a really important thing. But when the job that they do is is delivering care to patients,
that elevates the purpose and mission that I have. So I've found a lot of purpose coming from outside of healthcare into healthcare and what our caregivers and clinicians do every day and the fact that we facilitate that. Awesome, and thank you for that subtle plug with saying care and elevate. Good, Nouman, I appreciate that. Okay, let's get right into the topic at hand. So workforce.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (02:25.548)
when we're all in this room here familiar with that topic. In fact, we could probably have a wallpaper with workforce just listed all over it. But I'm hearing more and more about a balanced workforce. What does that mean and why does it matter? You know, it's a complicated term and it's only getting more dynamic. So when I think of a balanced workforce, I think of do you have the right number of the right people with the right skills?
with the right level of sort of flexibility to be where you need them at the times you need them. Two components of that that I think are really interesting. One of them is around, as you think about getting the right balance on teams, what are some of the capabilities we have now of actually saying, what are the skills? What is the tenure mix? What is not only just the basic skill mix, but the dynamic mix between those teams? And how do you balance that out? And how do we use technology to better meet those needs?
And then second, with the imperative to really meet dynamic demand of patients, whether it's seasonal or sort of hourly or different acuity, different things that we're seeing over time, how do you have the right people with the right flexible either schedules or willingness or excitement to be there? And how do you balance that in a way that lets you optimize your cost, quality, and your experience as you're doing that?
Okay, that's great. The last few things you said really talking about what happens if you do this right and you mentioned cost. Pat, do you have any thoughts on how that workforce balance is helping from a cost perspective? Yeah, mean, from my perspective, all of the leaders that I talk to, cost management is, you know, it's a prime factor. And, you know, you're balancing resource needs.
And those are balanced with care delivery needs. And whenever you're doing that and you're doing that effectively and you have the right mix model for your workforce, you're going to have the best cost management as well. Okay, so we talked about mix and model. We talked about that it helps with cost. Easier kind of said than done. How do you do it? What's a key enabler for a balanced workforce?
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (04:42.55)
So there are a lot of pieces, you know, as I think about balancing a workforce, you have to start at the very beginning. What do you actually need? What's the demand as your system's evolving, as you're opening up, you know, out of hospital settings and building out your entire capabilities in person and virtual, really across all aspects? What do you really need? What are the number of people? What are the types of people? What are the dynamics between people? What are the skills that you need today, the skills that you need tomorrow? So that planning component,
is where I think several folks do some planning, but not necessarily the robust dynamic planning that'll really set you up for the entire process. Because from there, you get into, all right, let's do part of planning. Then let's figure out hiring strategies, retention, recruitment, people strategies. Then let's figure out how we actually have schedules and predictive schedules. What does that look like to actually connect from a technology perspective into other systems? And also, what are the functions or what are the structures
that you put people into that let you have flexibility? Are there float pools? Are there different training programs? We had a great conversation last night at dinner around rotational training and how you can really get folks to understand different aspects. And does this then appeal to this generation of healthcare workforce in a way that you really can't do another way? So there are a lot of components to it, but I think starting at the beginning and then going all the way through as seamless as you can make that entire.
planning and operationalization process better. And just as we were talking about work-wise and integrated technologies, it is a lot to come together. It is a hard thing to be seamless and to have that frictionless experience. Maybe, Pat, can you talk a little bit more about the technologies or the underpinnings of helping to create that frictionless experience? Yeah, mean, when I think about frictionless, you think about all the stakeholders that
that are involved, so whether it's the clinicians, it's folks that are hiring, you have to think about that experience and it's facilitated by technology and integrated technology. We try to think about it, I think, in sort of four key components. There's obviously a technology layer that you're going to have. In a lot of cases, that's workforce technology like VMS.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (07:08.258)
Then you're gonna think about the program itself, the program that you run, and that's an in-source, outsource decision. So whether you want to manage that process yourself, or you wanna have AMN manage it, or somebody else. And then you think about the supply strategy around that, and that is very much, I would say with supply strategy, it's category and location dependent. So you're trying to have a...
calibrated supply strategy. And then you have to wrap it all in governance. And governance is really important because you want to make sure that the outcome that you're after is co-owned by, if it's AMN or whoever your provider is, and you. So it's very critical that that co-ownership happens. But it all goes back to that original foundation of technology enablement.
There's a lot of threads that we could pull there before I do, though, Meredith, is there anything else that you'd like to add on this topic? You know, I think as I hear about the technology and the enablement, and this might not be smiled upon in a live podcast, but how many of you have a lot of point solutions where you're finding a lot of these solutions have to be, you well, you go here for this, you go there for that, you have to log in again. Anybody? Yeah, we can't have that. It's too complicated.
The more that these systems can actually integrate, talk to one another, create an experience that is easy to navigate and also takes into consideration those pieces of data that you really don't want to miss, that's very important, especially when it comes to workforce. It would then allow us to say, what are folks' preferences on scheduling when we're actually trying to fill a schedule? Or how can we ensure that this patient is actually matched with the right person without having to have someone check here, check there, document four times?
So point solutions are dead and very excited about what the future holds with integrating this technology. Yes, I can barely remember passwords to log into my own system. So you're always re-authenticating. Thank you for the security. Appreciate that. But so I guess going back, Pat, you mentioned specifically VMS and you mentioned specifically vendor neutral. I think I've heard some potential misconceptions or rumors.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (09:28.194)
Talk to me a little bit more about can a staffing company or a company that has a staffing arm truly be vendor neutral? What are some of the truths and misconceptions there? First of all, I think it's a good question and it's a very fair question. The way I would think about it, and a little bit of this is my past informing my present, but staffing firms in general have very, very deep expertise in how to
find, recruit, retain talent. So that's a core premise of these programs. I think the other thing, and I mentioned this before, is governance. So when you have a program and you're running it with a provider, whomever it is, the client has a responsibility and the provider has a responsibility to ensure that the outcomes that you're planning are actually being achieved.
So that is really, I think, a key component. Then the other, if we go back to tech, if you have the right tech, you're gonna generate the transparency, leverage, control that you're after with your program. So you generate the transparency that allows you to have good governance over the program with the technology itself. Okay, so vendor neutral, obviously a very attractive option right now. A lot of energy about it.
lot of energy about it. So what are the most successful models that we're seeing out there? I really don't like to think of it in a binary, whether it's what we used to do versus been a neutral or I do think there's not a one size fits all environment that we're in. The talent environments are becoming much more complicated. We're thinking about talent much more holistically than we used to. And so I would say
you know, what we see more often than not is rather than a pure vendor neutral model, we may have vendor neutral as a part of the program delivery. I mentioned category and location specific solutions before, and you could have for one category of labor, you could have a master supplier for another, you could have vendor neutral and you can have them in the same program. So.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (11:48.78)
This is, I think that calibration to the need and a more sophisticated need is in order. Okay, great. Meredith, anything to double down on or add to? You know, it's interesting. I feel like so much in healthcare comes in cycles, whether it's accountable care organizations or the vendor neutral versus master supplier conversation. At the end of the day, what I see is health systems want
Reliable reliability. They want great people to reliably show up when you're asking for them with the right skill sets with confidence that this individual is not only credentials, but motivated and wonderful and you know also simplifies the process for that health system to do it. So I find that as we go back and forth at the end of the day, it's really do you have a partner and you have technology at the core that are going to make this easy for you that are going to ensure the right people are.
showing up at your doorstep, excited about your health system and excited about caring for your patients. Pat, a little bit of a non-scripted curveball. you're okay with that. you are you come from not health care, but you're in health care. Can you give a little insight on maybe some of the trends you saw in commercial and maybe how you're seeing health care follows? Yeah, it's interesting. So in the world that I inhabited for many, many years,
Actually, the original construct was neutral, like a pure neutral model. And we moved away from that over time to a more moderated approach and a little bit more calibrated approach based on the category, location, dynamics of the labor that we were going after. So I think that you're gonna see those sorts of...
changes and evolution and healthcare as well where you're thinking about the workforce as I said before a lot more holistically and thinking about it not just nursing, not just locums, not just non-clinical, but thinking about that in a holistic program. So what other considerations should people be thinking as they're choosing a model or choosing a company or thinking about even technology to engage on?
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (14:04.16)
Yeah, so maybe I'll just double down on some of the stuff that Carrie said earlier. You know, we're a public company. That carries with it a lot of responsibility and regulatory oversight. And we are doing a lot of the some of the things that people don't see, the non-sexy stuff. So whether it's having a comprehensive MDR, doing the rapid pen testing,
you know, all of those things, SOC 2 compliance, those are things that they really matter and they especially matter in the threat environment that we have out there today because cyber is just something that I think keeps most executives up at night. So we've covered some large topics in a pretty short amount of time. What did we maybe not
dive into deep enough that you want to give just an extra little bullet point on before we talk about what's next. You know, it starts to get into a little bit of what's next. Yeah, go ahead. But I'm excited about as workforce evolves. So you think of this imperative around a balanced workforce to just meet your demand with the right supply. As we start to evolve and as different technologies advance, really attacking at that intersection.
where we can make things more efficient or where we can make it just easier for folks to do their jobs, whether it's for a manager when an automated system is actually just going through the flow of, so-and-so can't come to work today. I've automatically gone through an order of preference and list, folks who haven't worked their designated hours, folks who have not yet hit overtime in a part-time capacity, contingent workforce.
know, folks wanting to pick up an extra per diem shift, whatever order that is, it does it for you. You just get a text saying, it's been solved, you're good. That component, and then as we really start to look forward, what are the efficiency enablers at that point too? You one of the areas that I'm excited about, and if you saw me giving a hug to the bright green machine in the hallway, don't mind me, that are language services. You know, the ability to bring video interpretation to the bedside immediately in, you know, in so many languages and.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (16:23.694)
Just with zero hesitation, saves patients time, it reduces length of stay, it reduces wait time in an emergency department. It makes the interaction more efficient and it makes it more delightful for the patient and for the clinician. So more of that as we evolve. What are those efficiency drivers? Where are we actually using technology at those points of intersection in a way where we are no longer gonna have such a big gap between supply and demand because we've actually attacked it at the center. Love that.
Pat, same for you. What's next in your opinion? Yeah, I mean, I've been alluding to it a little bit in my comments. I do think that sort of the siloed world of talent, that those silos are going to start to break down. You you're not going to have nurse only solutions, physician only solutions, non-clinical solutions. You know, we look at even some of the functionality that we're building into some
to our tools and we have the ability to do multi category programs, bring in non-clinical spin, statement of work spin. So I do think that we're gonna see sort of a convergence of programs and how they become a lot more holistic and bring in a lot of different talent delivery models.
you know, both for permanent hiring as well as contingent labor. So, yeah, it's it's exciting to to sort of watch it unfold. We've had design sessions where we've sat down with our design team. A shout out to Will Morse out there. And we've started drawing pictures, pictograms of our programs. And you can see that they are becoming much more holistic and much more
focused on all categories of labor. Excellent. Lots of stuff to continue to dive into, but we will kind of cap it there for now. We'll also have to maybe insert a picture of this green machine that you were talking about so people have a reference point. But Meredith and Pat, thank you so much for joining us on ElevateCare today. And to our listeners and viewers, please find us anywhere you subscribe to your favorite podcasts, Spotify, et cetera. And we look forward to you joining us next time on ElevateCare.
AMN Healthcare Podcasts (18:47.778)
Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on Elevate Care. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with a colleague and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform. You can learn more about this episode and our show on our website at amnhelfcare.com and follow us on social media to stay updated on new episodes and the ever-changing world of healthcare.