As technology advances at a rapid pace, the landscape of the tech and healthcare industry is evolving, where companies are seeking ways to stay ahead the competition and meet the needs of their consumers. In this episode, Kerry interviews Liz Cunningham, the Vice President of Digital Solutions at AMN Healthcare and co-host of our show. They discuss the evolution of candidate experience with AMN Passport, the approach of a tech-centric total talent solution across the workforce, the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI), and the next big thing to come in healthcare.
As technology advances at a rapid pace, the landscape of the tech and healthcare industry is evolving, where companies are seeking ways to stay ahead the competition and meet the needs of their consumers. In this episode, Kerry interviews Liz Cunningham, the Vice President of Digital Solutions at AMN Healthcare and co-host of our show. They discuss the evolution of candidate experience with AMN Passport, the approach of a tech-centric total talent solution across the workforce, the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI), and the next big thing to come in healthcare.
Welcome aboard to Season 2 of Elevate Care!
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
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TIMESTAMPS
(00:22) Meet Liz
(01:14) Evolution of Candidate Experience with AMN Passport
(7:20) Tech-Centric Total Talent Solutions Approach
(11:27) The Buzz of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
(17:21) What’s The Next Big Thing?
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ABOUT KERRY
Kerry Perez hosts the Elevate Care Podcast, dedicated to driving innovation in workforce technology, total talent management, and workforce staffing needs.
As the Vice President, Enterprise Strategy at AMN Healthcare, Kerry Perez leads the design and implementation of enterprise strategies to fuel growth and achieve market leadership.
With over 15 years of experience in various healthcare roles at AMN, including recruitment, marketing, innovation, strategy, and mergers and acquisitions, Kerry established AMN's Diligence and Integration Management Office in her previous role. There, she oversaw the strategic and functional integration of new acquisitions to enhance value.
Guided by principles of customer obsession, ambitious thinking, and tangible results, Kerry's personal and professional mantra is "Be a Somebody who Makes Everybody Feel Like a Somebody." Committed to mentoring emerging leaders and building high-performing teams, Kerry holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Business Economics and Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
ABOUT LIZ
Liz Cunningham, Vice President of Digital Solutions at AMN Healthcare since 2020, drives digital transformation for a seamless user experience powered by self-service, AI, and automation. She manages a diverse team of senior leaders and team members across product management, digital marketing, engineering, analytics, and user experience. In 2023, Liz also assumed the role of transforming AMN's enterprise customer support department, implementing new technology and a streamlined operating model.
In her 11-year tenure with AMN, Liz has taken on various roles, from heading AMN's clinician strategy during COVID-19 response to leading enterprise operations and branding for the Healthcare Staffing Divisions. Presently, Liz leads her team in managing the industry-leading healthcare professional application, AMN Passport, and spearheads new digital experience platforms, fostering digital-first engagements for clients and candidates.
Outside of work, Liz is dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship. As a Board Member for the ZIP Launch Pad, a San Diego State-funded Innovation center, she actively champions early-stage startups founded by SDSU students and faculty. In her free time, Liz is cultivating a unique passion for cheese and is working towards becoming a cheese monger, adding a flavorful layer to her diverse interests.
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ABOUT THE SHOW
Elevate Care Podcast delves into the latest trends, thinking, and best practices shaping the landscape of healthcare. From total talent management to solutions and strategies to expand the reach of care, we discuss methods to enable high quality, flexible workforce and care delivery. We will discuss the latest advancements in technology, the impact of emerging models and settings, physical and virtual, and address strategies to identify and obtain an optimal workforce mix. Tune in to gain valuable insights from thought leaders focused on improving healthcare quality, workforce well-being, and patient outcomes.
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
Welcome to Elevate Care, the show where healthcare professionals, visionaries, and thought leaders come together to discuss the limitless possibilities of healthcare innovation. I am Keri Perez, your host, and I am joined here with my esteemed colleague, Liz Cunningham, VP of Digital Solutions. Welcome, Liz. Thanks for joining. Thank you, Keri. Thanks for having me. So excited to talk with you today. Before we get going, could you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with AMN for, oh, my 11-year anniversary is coming up very soon. So 11 years. And actually started in the marketing space at AMN, which is why I think I'm uniquely positioned now to be in the technology space, since we're really tying together experiences that marketing and clinician experience creates, tying it with digital solutions and technology. So that's why I'm really passionate about what I do now. evolved in my career over AMN of just creating things that bring delight to our clinicians and our clients. And whether it's through marketing or operations or technology, I've just been able to build on that for the last 10 years. So, you know, we grew up a little bit together in the marketing department and you have always had such a knack for really putting your yourself in the position of a candidate. And for us, candidates are everything from our nurses to our doctors. to our interpreters. And it is such an important part of our ecosystem right now because we know, of course, there's a clinician shortage. We don't have to really talk about that. But tell me a little bit about sort of the evolution of candidate acquisition and how important it is to have that candidate experience be the center part. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. And I think what happened during the pandemic. added a lot more of options. So I feel like nurses had this amazing opportunity of choice over the last five years. And with choice, then forces companies like us, staffing companies, and health care systems to really step it up when it comes to the engagement and the experience that they're creating to attract and retain those talent. So I feel like that's been something that's really been an interesting evolution. and put a lot of power back into the hands of our clinicians because they are in high demand. And they do have a choice. So when it comes to AMN and what we build in the experience, we try to create, one, I think we have to be aware of the choice. And two, we have to create experiences that meet the clinician where they're at in their career. I think when you think about the spectrum of new grads to travel nurses to per diem clinicians to permanent nurses to nurse managers and I'm just using nurse as an example for now. We can't just kind of shove that down a clinician's throat at all points in time. We really have to be thoughtful about what is the right time to pull that person into that career. When makes the most sense for them? What are those buying signals? And that's really what we've been focused on here of just... meeting them where they're at, whether it's technology or recruiters or helping the health systems identify that for their clinicians. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And something that you alluded to, I want to touch on a little bit more, is the concept of choice and also the concept of self-service. So I know you've been really spearheading a lot of our efforts with our clinician-facing app, Passport. Congratulations. I think it's still at, you know, 4.7 stars in our... Hanging in there, yes. Yeah, yeah. But that's really been such a leading technology for our clinicians to kind of have their choice in their hands. Maybe can you talk a little bit about some of the capabilities of Passport and how during this pandemic you've even evolved that to meet the needs of our clients, maybe such as float pool or things like that? Yeah, so the journey of AEM and Passport has been an evolution over the last... of the last few years. And I think if you think about it as just a standalone app, maybe by itself it's not that revolutionary. But if you think about it as an app that's embedded into the daily life of our clinicians and our health care professionals and can be used at various points in your career, then it becomes something useful that you're not offloading whenever you're. 30 days of not uploading new apps expires on your phone. All of us have that when you go and you're like, oh, I haven't used that app for a year and I have to re-download it. So our goal is that remains, AMI passport remains relevant to the clinician throughout their life cycle. So like I said, it's evolved. I mean, it first started as a job app, right? How do we get the right jobs to the clinicians at the right time? Then it started to evolve into a community app. So how do we actually allow for clinicians to engage with other clinicians and stay engaged in our app when it comes to beyond just finding that job. And then we started to say, okay, well, what resources do clinicians need when they're starting to look for jobs? And how do we create more blogs and articles that help educate them on when should you think about travel nursing? When is Per Diem right for you? When is it time to go perm? How do you find the right hospital that meets your needs? How do you know as a first-time traveler what's a travel-friendly hospital to go to? So we really started to just evolve and add more useful tools beyond a transaction that have then turned our app into being quite a sticky app, right? Stickiness and engagement is how we measure success. And we've gone from an app where, in the beginning, someone logged in a couple times, their first download, found a job, and never used it again, to now an app that people are using once, if not twice a week. And we're continuously adding more and more engaged users onto that app. And I know you're always kind of measuring and getting feedback from clinicians throughout their experience. How have you? taken some of that feedback and built it back into the app to really be focusing on that experience for a clinician. Yeah, we say our app is built for clinicians by clinicians. We have consistent voice of the customer panels that our team runs monthly and ad hoc as we're bringing in new features. And what we do is we don't just build something and then say, hey, physical therapist, what do you think of this new thing we built? It's actually at the design phase hey, we heard a problem that you're trying to solve is that you're unable to tell if this new hospital you're going to is traveler friendly. So here are a couple ideas that we had. What do you think? And we'll actually iterate and design with them in these sessions. And then by the time we're launching the app capability, it's something that we already know is wanted versus us building something that is then maybe accepted. Another cool thing, I think, watching the evolution of your time at AMN. is also getting more in front of our clients, especially now that technology is just so ever present in every conversation. AMN, tech-centric total talent solutions company, you spent some time with our clients and talking to them. Can you give us a little insight about what they're asking for? As I mentioned, this supply-driven market over the last five years, we are now seeing a pendulum swing to focusing on the clients and actually their digital capabilities. I think sometimes it's easy to talk about all the great things we're doing for our candidates and we will continue to always do those for our candidates. But we do have a two-sided marketplace, right? We've got all the capabilities and the B2C that we have to do for our clinicians and then on the B2B side for our clients. So a couple of things for clients that I think is interesting, and I think it's interesting ad hoc products that have come into the workforce technology space over the last couple of years. A lot of us have purchased those. AMNs purchased them. Clients have purchased them where a couple years ago you had a separate product for scheduling and you had a separate VMS and you had a separate ATS and you had a separate HRS and EMR and going and keep going and going and going. We're seeing so much consolidation in that platform plays. You're seeing your ATS combined with your HRS. You're seeing your scheduling solution combined with your time and attendance solution. And I think hospitals are trying to figure out in their IT strategy how they're going to combine all of this, but then also how they're going to have a workforce technology and a workforce staffing partner that can grow into that space with them. So I think we're all figuring it out together. And they've been a lot of consultative conversations around, OK, if I'm thinking about buying this new scheduling technology or using AMN scheduling technology for SmartSquare, for example, well, can I use that with a VMS? Do I need a VMS? How does that work when I have holes in my schedule still? Do I want to use a marketplace solution? And they've been really. Two-way conversations between us and the client solve issues and problems and all have its place. But just like everybody else, a hospital client doesn't want 15 places to log into and have a disconnected experience. So I feel like your point on moving more towards this platform play and getting into this ecosystem. is super valid. So thanks for sharing that perspective. Yeah, and if you don't mind me just adding one more thought to it, it's also about aggregating the data, right? So even if maybe the platforms are separate, maybe you do still have a different scheduling solution than your HRS system. Like, that's OK. But how do you unlock the value of data? I was just reading an interesting article about a health system in Nebraska. And they were saying that leveraging behavioral data for their clinicians plus some AI capabilities like increased their retention rate, or sorry, yes, increased their retention rate times two, doubled their retention rate. And I read the headline of the article, and I'm like, all right, how does AI help with retention? So I dove into it, and I thought it was really interesting, because really it was a data play. It was like, what are the signals out there that indicate burnout? How do I know that a clinician worked doubles back to back because her colleague was a no-show two days in a row. How do I know that the patient volume for that unit was way above what the norm should be for the last three weeks in a row? And how do I take that data to then say, hey, alert, this clinician might be getting burnt out. And then with those signals, how do I then layer on the human element of, hey, do you need some time off? Let me go have a more senior nurse back you so you have an easier shift, things like that. So I also think across all those systems, there's these nuggets that you can kind of bring together from a data solution to then make some action against what's happening. Yeah. You just mentioned AI, and it feels like you can't go anywhere without stumbling upon somebody talking about AI. And it's such a buzzy word. Everyone has a perspective on it. And I'm just curious. What does it actually mean now? I feel like it's something that everybody says that they need and maybe there's oftentimes people gobbling up assets that have AI in it, but why is it actually relevant now? Yeah, so I am no AI expert, so I will say that right now. But I think the most important thing is AI is buzzy right now because of generative AI. Think about the chat GPTs of the world. And that's all about generating novel content. So something new, right? Something that's not just taking existing data and predicting what's gonna happen. It's about generating something new. And I still think that space is experimental when it comes to healthcare and healthcare staffing. I will say, I think LinkedIn did something pretty creative with generative AI recently, and they have, will be something we could apply in the staffing space. But they have a, oh, I forgot what it's called. But it's like some sort of LinkedIn assist. So basically, when you go to look at a job, it'll pop up and say, hey, do you want to see how your profile would rank against this job? And basically, what it's doing is it's taking the large language model and saying, OK, based on all these different types of candidates that get these different types of jobs, Here's like 10 things you're missing from your profile. And it's actually recommending to you what to add to your profile so that the person actually looks at your resume. And it's not just looking at a field that's open and a field that you need to fill out, which to me doesn't seem like AI. Correct. This is probably looking at what the potential is for a human to care about what you put on paper. Correct, correct. And I think in the staffing space, too, we've used AI for image recognition for a while. The credentialing space, everyone knows that's a painful process. And we're trying to continuously take handwritten documents and turn them into structured data. That's a form of AI, right? Even some semantic searching capabilities, natural language processing, they're all different forms of AI. But the buzz right now is around generative. How do we use it? And I do think there will be use cases in the health care space, especially for us on the staffing side. But there always will probably be caution when it comes to actually, you know. patient engagement on that side of the house. OK, great. Thanks for that deep dive. I do want to circle back to one element I didn't ask when we were talking about tech platform. And actually, recently, you and I attended an event about IT and staffing. And you asked a really good question to the panel that maybe I want to see if I'm going to ask it back to you if you might have an answer. So you were referencing all the proliferation of all this technology and all these different point solutions. And you asked a great question of, well, what should be removed now that we have this different sort of ecosystem with things coming together? If you were asked that question, what would you answer? Yeah, so technology is expensive. This is not free. And especially if you're not. building something yourself and you're deciding to buy and partner with various SaaS solutions, you're paying licensing fees that can add up to a couple thousand dollars a month per person using all these different solutions. So we could just talk about a recruiter, for example. Think about the desk of a recruiter right now. They could have a chat bot through one company. They could have an automated referencing solution through another. They could have a, you know, conversational SMS through another solution. They could have an ATS, they could have a CRM. They could have so many different capabilities, but you're spending on every single one of them. So I don't know if I think any of them are gonna go away, but I am seeing companies out there unlocking kind of a secret sauce to combining them all into one platform. So do I think... multimodal communication and the need to be able to transition from chat to SMS to email to doing your ATS matching and ranking, doing your relationship management, your CRM is going to go away. No. Do I think bringing them all together into one solution will continue to be out there? Yes. And I think it will be really interesting to see who survives in that space, because there are a lot of companies that I think are close. but a lot of them are doing the same thing, and using the AI buzzword to try to get you to buy their product. Exactly. So I think it's going to be consolidation versus necessarily removal of some of those capabilities. Maybe the auto-dialer will go away. How about that? The auto-dialer is going to go away. There's no chance that lives in a space where you have so many other ways to communicate. You have so many regulations with TCPA. Like, The auto-dialer, that's mine. That's mine, put that on there. That makes a lot of sense. We don't need just random dialing. Now we'll have curated lists of people who are waiting for our call based off of what we're predicting. Based on a website that you just looked on or something that you just looked on social media. It'll be targeted and specific, not random. And wanted. Hopefully. Yeah. Okay, this next question is just a little bit off script, but you have a unique perspective coming from marketing. you know, talking with clients, technology, even your background, you know, outside of AMN. What are some things that, you know, you're thinking about that maybe other people aren't that you think we should be? So I'll stick with the theme of consolidation. And I don't think that maybe no one's thinking about this. But I think a problem that a lot of our clients and our clinicians are experiencing is that there are a lot of apps and capabilities in the healthcare workforce technology space right now that seem cool and are pretty flashy. I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation happening in the per diem and marketplace space. I think there are a lot of apps out there that are selling a marketplace to clients that seem to solve a problem to fill holes in their schedules. But I think everyone's missing the clinician experience behind that. I think that you can't expect a clinician in one metro area that's floating across five facilities to have five different applications in her pocket to pick up a shift. And I think what we really need to be thinking about is remembering about the two-sided marketplace. And like I talked about on the client aggregation, it's there. But the clinicians are more likely the ones using apps and self-service from a day-to-day perspective. And they're not going to put up. with using five different things. So I think we'll see consolidation in that space. And I think we're going to have to figure out, what does that look like? What does it mean? How do we still do it in a way where the clinician has choice but that we've created a better self-service experience for them to pick up shifts and jobs where they want to? I love that. I mean, it brings it full circle to these are people. Right. And they have experiences. And it is not a transactional experience of just getting someone to fill a job. These are people with choice and who are experiencing things not just within the healthcare sector. They are having a good experience with an app, you know, on Uber or with ordering from, you know, their local restaurant. They're going to take that same perspective of what they expect into this setting as well. Right. Yeah. Right. Awesome. Okay. Last question for you, Liz. There's a lot of... trouble and pressure in healthcare. We know them all. We don't have to go through the basics, but you know, of course cost and the shortage, but we're in the space and we care about and we're passionate about it. And we've been here for a long time. Why are you hopeful and optimistic about healthcare? Healthcare has always been known as being very behind in a tech space. And I think over the last year, two years, there are a lot of eyes. and regulation and questions to these tech giants that haven't been questioned since their inception. So maybe I'm hopeful that it's not a bad thing that healthcare's a little behind, because from a technology perspective, we'll learn from these mature tech giants and figure out. the rules of the road when it comes to data privacy, figure out the rules of the road when it comes to content moderation and generative AI. And maybe it'll be the perfect time for health care to really accelerate forward to being more tech-first, because we have smart people thinking about it. The investments are out there. And we've learned from the mistakes of non-health care technology solutions. Liz, thank you so much. Really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you for keeping the Clinician and the Client Experience Center and everything that you do. And everyone, thanks for joining today. Hope you enjoyed listening to us. Please feel free to find out more information on amnhalthcare.com and follow us on social media at amnhalthcare and listen to us on your favorite podcast platform.