What does it take to guide healthcare through evolving times? Tune in as Kerry Perez, host of Elevate Care, engages in a thoughtful and inspiring conversation with Cary Grace, CEO and President of AMN Healthcare. Cary’s story offers a grounded perspective on what it means to lead through change. From her unique path in healthcare to the transformation of AMN Healthcare, you'll gain a better understanding of how the right balance of innovation and human connection can shape the industry. Together, Kerry and Cary discuss the vital role technology and people play in driving meaningful progress. At the heart of the conversation lies a powerful reminder of the importance of trust, integrity, and collaboration. Cary Grace shares her insights on building partnerships that can withstand challenges and create shared value—not just for organizations but for the communities they serve. Looking to the future, Cary reflects on how AMN Healthcare is preparing for what’s next. They explore emerging trends and discuss how we can approach these shifts with cautious optimism and a commitment to care. This episode extends an invitation to explore not just what’s possible for healthcare, but how, together, we can take meaningful steps toward a stronger, more connected future.
What does it take to guide healthcare through evolving times? Tune in as Kerry Perez, host of Elevate Care, engages in a thoughtful and inspiring conversation with Cary Grace, CEO and President of AMN Healthcare.
Cary’s story offers a grounded perspective on what it means to lead through change. From her unique path in healthcare to the transformation of AMN Healthcare, you'll gain a better understanding of how the right balance of innovation and human connection can shape the industry. Together, Kerry and Cary discuss the vital role technology and people play in driving meaningful progress.
At the heart of the conversation lies a powerful reminder of the importance of trust, integrity, and collaboration. Cary Grace shares her insights on building partnerships that can withstand challenges and create shared value—not just for organizations but for the communities they serve.
Looking to the future, Cary reflects on how AMN Healthcare is preparing for what’s next. They explore emerging trends and discuss how we can approach these shifts with cautious optimism and a commitment to care.
This episode extends an invitation to explore not just what’s possible for healthcare, but how, together, we can take meaningful steps toward a stronger, more connected future.
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This episode offers a balanced perspective on the challenges and opportunities ahead for the healthcare industry.
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Welcome to Elevate Care. I'm your host, Keri Perez, and I am thrilled today to have our special guest. It is our CEO and president of AMN Healthcare, Kerry Grace. Cary, welcome to the show. Thank you. And we get this great opportunity to be the two Keri's I like it. Kerry and Cary. It's wonderful. Awesome. Well, Kerry, I've had the pleasure of getting to know you over the past year and some change. But for our listeners and viewers who haven't had that chance, can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey to how you got to be?
CEO and president of AMN Healthcare. Yeah, of course. I joined AMN Healthcare actually two years ago this week and my journey leading up to coming to AMN, I had been a longtime leader of very large global businesses that really had three core components to them. One is they typically were growth businesses and had a growth story behind them.
The second is they were businesses that had an impact. And so they had a solution set that was incredibly meaningful and important in the sector that they served. And the third was that they had really strong brands and culture. And so when I was approached about coming to AMN and I really looked at those three core tenants, AMN had all of those. And particularly,
right before I joined AMN, and really for 15 years before that, I'd spent a lot of time around healthcare and really helping drive better healthcare outcomes and also around global human capital and had run a really big business in that. And so the intersection for me of joining an organization that really was about the future of healthcare human capital.
And how we could make that better for the entire healthcare ecosystem was really appealing. But really the decision point for me was culture matters and AMN has just such a great, strong values-based, mission-based culture that that really was the driving decision for me coming over here. Excellent.
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So you mentioned, you know, kind of a long history within healthcare. What's your sort of kind of position on the healthcare industry, where it's been and maybe AMN's role in creating the future of healthcare? So I am the daughter of two healthcare professionals. My mom was an OR nurse. My dad was a dentist and a psychologist. And so my dad was my first boss. And so I worked in his office. I was, you know, just had the extraordinary opportunity.
to experience what it meant to be a healthcare professional, you know, growing up with two just incredibly dedicated examples of that. And all of, you know, my community and our friends were very aligned around healthcare. And so I got to see a lot of what was great about healthcare and a lot of the things that really needed to change. And so as I think about
where we are in healthcare and in the industry is we really collectively are grappling with how do we meet the increasing demand, largely driven by an aging population. So you have demand increases, you have all types of new innovations around care. They're not accessible equally to everyone. So there's a lot of questions around
access and equity. And there's a lot of questions around, do we have a broad and deep enough clinical set of professionals to be able to meet some of those rising demands? And so the challenges are significant. The opportunities against that are also significant. And I think it's actually one of the most important, if not the most important, issue for our country.
is around healthcare and really driving continued quality outcomes in an affordable way and in a way that really provides access. AMN is going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary this next year. As you look back and kind of coming into this space and with all of your history, how would you, in your own words, of describe the evolution of AMN? Gosh, 40 years is such a huge milestone. I feel so lucky to
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to be leading AMN as we celebrate this milestone. I'll give you a framework of what I think has sustained AMN's leadership and really kind of leading in innovation throughout those 40 years. We have been customer-centric. So we have been focused on what do our clients need? What are their goals? How do we help them achieve their goals? Where are our clinicians?
What are, how do they want to work? How do they want to live? How can we enable more clinicians to be fully engaged in the workforce? And so this constant focus on ensuring that we have the needs of our clients and our clinicians at the forefront, I think has really been at the forefront of what has been the cornerstone of AMN's success.
And so you see that from, you know, we started 40 years ago as a travel nurse company and, you know, really built that industry from nothing. We have evolved from there into a more diversified total talent solutions company. And if you think about the era that we're in now, it really is around how do you become more tech enabled?
both in your organization, but in your solutions that are supporting these really big healthcare providers. And so it's quite exciting where we are and really exciting where we're going. The other big piece that for as long as we have been here, it's actually quite a proud thing, is our culture really hasn't changed.
And so all the things that we do and all the innovation that we've accomplished, the heart of who we are is still so rooted in our values around inclusion and trust and purpose and partnership. And so all of those great things about who we are has fueled our ability
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to throughout four decades be a leader and an innovator. And I really do think it's gonna be a really big fuel for our success in this next era. You mentioned a lot about our values. You started talking about technology and sort of the evolution. Can we dive a little bit more on that important intersection of tech and people and keeping the heart of healthcare present?
Yeah, know, so the way I would describe whenever I get asked about, you know, technology, and there's so many conversations around how critically important technology is to the future of fill in the blank, right? It's across every industry and it's certainly true in healthcare. And I believe that people are always going to be the heart and soul of healthcare.
It's who we're serving. There is always going to be the most critical element that is going to be people-based. But it will be an and with technology. so technology should be helping.
our healthcare professionals to be able to spend more time in what brings them great joy and where they are the most impactful, which is the care for patients, the ability to use technology to free them up, starting from whether they are in a leadership position, whether they are in a direct care position, whether they are behind the scenes, that it is making us better and allowing us to focus on the things that matter.
You know, it's interesting, my daughter started out as a pre-med major and one of the things very early on, I think it was like her first, you know, kind of practical at the hospital. And they basically framed it up and said, the great thing about your role is there's always going to be a need for people in healthcare. And
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There are certain roles in some industries that, you know, 20 years from now, that might not actually be the case. People are always going to be at the core of great healthcare delivery. Technology will increasingly enhance that. I love that because sometimes it can feel like just talking about tech only can feel over like over rotating. It's ever present. is important. It's so important for our future. But the and.
that you mentioned, I think it's tech and people. And I just think an important message that we don't overlook. The other thing that you spoke about when you talking about the evolution was about how we have met clients where they're at and sort of evolving with innovations. Is there anything in particular that you're kind of most proud of or you feel like is most impactful? I have the great privilege of getting to spend a lot of time.
with our clients and really with leaders across the industry, as well as with our clinicians and getting to hear from them. A couple of themes. First, I'll start at the broadest piece, and it really goes back a little bit to your earlier comment around the tech piece and the innovation. I think we've seen or it's felt like there's been an acceleration of that conversation the past couple of years. And I think that's
Accelerations happening because we really had three years during the pandemic where every healthcare system was really just trying to get through this generational, you know, pandemic that none of us had really ever experienced. So there was a fair amount of pent up demand for innovation coming out of that, that I think the acceleration that a number of us feel is real.
And so we're trying, you know, as an ecosystem to get caught up to the opportunity after three years of being incredibly focused on mission critical work around the pandemic and now getting back to, you know, in our case and what we do with our clients, how do we help them build sustainable quality workforces? And so that has huge impact for me around those conversations and how we help them do that.
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The stories that are so incredibly exciting to me are anything that really showcases the power of what's possible and the power of people. And so that ranges from, you know, a client coming to us and saying, Hey, you, you promised that you were going to help us get this type of cost savings or this type of quality outcome.
And you not only did it, but you surpassed it and you made a huge difference to, you know, our ability to achieve our mission. I love those stories. I've gotten a letter from the governor of a state talking about interim leader and how that leader helped them get through literally a huge healthcare crisis that they had. have international nurses that we have helped them come over to find meaningful roles.
in providing healthcare in some of, you know, just incredible communities across the country. And the stories not only of what they're doing in those communities, but the story of how we're setting up their family and generations of their family to come to have a different life, makes me emotional even thinking about. And so the beautiful thing about what we do is we make a difference.
and we can have an impact and that looks very different depending on what part of our business you're talking about, but the impact is meaningful. So everything that you described kind of sums, comes down to me to a word about partnership and not just a staffing company, not just a line item, but a true sort of partner that enables all of those stories that you just mentioned. What does being a partner mean to you in that lens?
There's a couple of truisms for me about partnership. One is you have shared success. You also have shared failures. And so it's hard for me to think of examples where you've been truly innovative, where everything has gone perfectly. And true partnerships are really defined as much of how you go through some of those challenges together.
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as the successes. It's easy to be a good partner. It's easy to be a good fill in the blank when everything is going well. Real partnership, real relationships are defined in the challenging times. We saw that in spades in the pandemic. We stood by our clients. They were our priority. They were our priority coming out. We had aligned goals. And so you really being there and being there for them.
throughout all types of conditions is a true partnership. Can we extend that partnership definition to those other constituents? 100%. And so I shared earlier, my heart is with our clinicians. it's literally where I was raised and who I was raised by. And so you just think about what we have asked health care professionals to do.
and pick whatever timeframe you want to pick, but they are the heroes in this narrative. And they get up every day and, you know, and they certainly did over the pandemic. They put the needs of others before they put their own needs first. And, you know, I look at part of our role is also to make sure that we are caring for the caregivers. And we do this in a number of different ways, but the clinicians are
the heart literally of what we do and we care about them and we care about their professional success. We care about their personal well-being and we want to be their partner literally from the moment they enter their profession to the moment that they retire. Yes, I was going to pick up on that thread of trust. What are some of the other characteristics that you think define a good partner?
that AMN upholds. Trust, integrity, transparency are the hallmarks, I think, of really strong partnerships. And the trust piece is built. And again, it comes from you going through all different types of business environments together.
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and not you just saying things, but you delivering. You are diving deep into kind of partnerships. When I think about AMN, we have just such a broad and deep set of solutions. What does it look like to deliver on those for our clients? Yeah, it's interesting. Delivering our solutions around total talent starts with what the client needs. And so we have some clients who come to us and say, my biggest challenge and my biggest need
is around language interpretation. And so we meet them and we solve their biggest need. We have clients who will come to us and say, I need help immediately on managing all my clinical and non-clinical contingent spend. And so I need the technology to do it better. I need the solutions to do it better. We help them with that need.
And we will help clients in whatever model they want. Some clients want to have the technology and do more of it themselves. We love that. Some clients want the technology and the services and want us to operate it. We love that. And so we really start first and foremost with what a client needs. We answer that need.
and deliver and help them. And then as we develop that relationship, as their needs evolve and they typically grow, we continue to help them with more of the things that matter to them and their priorities. You know, I think that really embodies and brings to life, you know, our goal of being their work first partner in the mission of care and that it's not a one size fits all.
And so whatever their mission is, whatever their focus is, we are there to kind of meet them where they're at from that client centric perspective. You know, being at AMN for 18 years, it is part of our culture and it is something that I've really taken a lot of pride in that we do the right thing. So that is who we are. But also maybe some other proof points or thoughts around how our structure as a public company helps us to enable to be, you know, that trusted partner. Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean, it just.
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You almost have to experience our culture to really understand what you and I are both reflecting on, but it's a really big reason why I came. We had all of the what in terms of the great capabilities and the brand and the relationships. And that's all what we do. Who we are and how we do things really matters. And it matters to our clients and our clinicians. And so.
As a public company where we are incredibly transparent, you see everything about our business line on a quarterly basis. Really, there's no other organization in our industry of our size that does that. We have independent governance, whether that's from our board, whether that's from regulators, that it's not just that
we are who we say we are. There is independent governance around everything about how we operate, which really is important for healthcare systems to be able to pick a partner that is going to match them in terms of what they need from a capability standpoint. But I'd say particularly as it becomes more tech enabled, having the confidence
around the governance and the transparency around how the company is operated that gives them that confidence of picking a great partner. Right. And you know, just the compliance, the SOC 2 type 2. I know it's just like such a hard, a hard fact, but that is important, especially as things become more more tech enabled to your point. Yeah, it's interesting. I could, as you were saying, SOC 2, I was thinking.
Gosh, I could come down with a list of kind of alphabet soup of all the phenomenal things that we do that we've built because we care about having, you know, just a broad, deep set of solutions. But what I'll say in shorthand and not kind of, and there's a number of things besides SOC 2 that I would kind of add to that is we really do take very seriously how we ensure that we are going to have the highest quality
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innovative solutions for our healthcare organizations and do it in a very transparent, very strong governed way of how we operate the business. I wanted to give you an opportunity to maybe talk about impact or purpose for community and the AMN team members. know, one of the, we always talk about community and your communities can be defined, you know,
in all different types of ways. And one of the beautiful things about AMN is we have so many communities, right? We have our community of AMNers. We have a number of resource groups within the organization where we have very strong alignment to different communities that speak to people and speak to individuals. We develop communities for our clinicians. We started to do that in our clinician app so that we can help clinicians connect to each other.
Whether that's in, you know, geographies that they may be in or interests. And so for me, one of the other really great things that we do is we have a incredibly passionate group of team members, AMN, who when they leave their kind of work environment, their community and their involvement in the community is extraordinarily strong. I ran into somebody today.
who is on the board of Big Brother Big Sisters. We have a celebration going on where we bring clients in and we're doing medical kits for the Dallas Fort Worth community. The list of organizations that we are engaged with that are making the world better for everyone is incredibly impressive. It's one of the things that I am just so proud of.
to be a part of this organization that we care. And the care is felt collectively when you come into AMN, but we have just extraordinary people here who want to make a difference in the entirety of what they do in their lives. And it shows in what we do in so many different ways, big and small, in our communities.
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I really felt that, that felt palpable what you were saying of just the authenticity behind that and knowing you personally, I really believe that. So with that and all of the change and kind of AMN's role in it, what is your hope within the next five years for AMN and the healthcare staffing industry as a whole? My hope is that we continue, if we were going to look back five years from now, that you would have
healthcare systems, healthcare providers, saying about AMN and about our industry, they were critical partners to helping us achieve our missions. individual missions may vary some, but the common elements in the missions are really about quality patient care. And my hope five years from now is that, and I'll put AMN at the top of that list,
is really cited as the partner in helping those organizations achieve their missions. So at the end of the day, AMN is in the business of a labor market. What are some of the trends that you're seeing right now? If you look at the highest level, we have increasing demand from a patient standpoint that we expect to continue. So you'll see different numbers around that.
most people think there's probably gonna be a mid single digit increase in demand driven by, mentioned this earlier, an aging population. And so we see that demand continue to increase. There's not enough supply of clinicians to be able to serve that demand. And so that's what these interesting conversations around, how do we continue to find ways to
attract more physicians, nurses, allied professionals into this space. How do we help those clinicians that are in the space today in a really healthy place from a wellbeing that they want to stay in? And then importantly, how do we continue to train up the next generation of clinicians? So the same demographic that is driving
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the increase in health care, in aging population, you also are going to have a number of clinicians, the most experienced clinicians, retiring from the workforce over the next 10 years. And so we really see an opportunity to find ways and solutions that are going to make that clinical workforce more efficient. How do we find ways that
through scheduling or through workforce management that in tech enablement on the clinical side, that we make the clinicians that we have much more effective in being able to do the work that only they can do and preserve them against this growing demand. And so we still see that macro supply demand thesis intact.
And we see really significant hiring of health systems, particularly post-COVID, that has happened over the last 18 months as they've built a more sustained workforce. And so we think that the workforce is going to continue to be, if not the top issue, among the top issues for health care systems.
Before we maybe kind of go into closing, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you'd like to leave with our audience? Maybe how you want people to describe AMN, how you want people to feel, or anything that we haven't touched on? You know, even as you were doing such a great job, you could be a professional in this. I think you really are. We're at this inflection point in the industry. It's such an interesting time.
You know, there's a big cyclical component that we certainly experienced over the past three years. But beyond that cyclicality of the business, there's just really important conversations and innovation happening in this space as we speak that I think is incredibly exciting and is going to be impactful as we think about.
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certainly how our organization, but how the industry can have a really positive impact on the future of healthcare. And that's very exciting to me. It energizes me. And I think where I see the most opportunity and progress is really those organizations and clinicians.
that are going to continue to, in a very high energy way, embrace that future. Kari, thank you so much for a great discussion. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, thank you for having me. Awesome. We will see you next time on Elevate Care. Thanks for listening and watching. 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.
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