Practical Strategies For Defining and Building True Partnerships with Cary Grace

Thank you. And we get this great opportunity to be the Two Carries today. I like it. Carrie and Carrie, it's wonderful.

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 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. So when I was approached about coming to AMN and I really looked at those three core tenets, 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 really was the driving decision for me coming over here.

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 had the extraordinary opportunity to experience what it meant to be a healthcare professional, growing up with two incredibly dedicated examples of that. And all of 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, 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.

Gosh, 40 years is such a huge milestone. I feel so lucky 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 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, 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 the cornerstone of AMN's success. And so you see that from we started 40 years ago as a travel nurse company and 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, and 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 to throughout four decades be a leader and an innovator. And I really do think it's going to be a really big fuel for our success in this next era.

The way I would describe it, whenever I get asked about technology, 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 enhanced with technology. And 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. 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 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 there are certain roles in some industries that 20 years from now 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 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 acceleration is happening because we really had three years during the pandemic where every healthcare system was really just trying to get through this generational 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 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, 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. 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 a client coming to us and saying, 'Hey, 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 our ability to achieve our mission.' I love those stories. I've gotten a letter from the governor of a state talking about an interim leader and how that leader helped them get through literally a huge healthcare crisis that they had. I have international nurses that we have helped come over to find meaningful roles in providing healthcare in some of the most incredible communities across the country. And the story is 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. It literally makes me emotional even thinking about it. 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.

There are 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 by how you go through some of those challenges together 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 really being there and being there for them throughout all types of conditions is a true partnership.

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 healthcare professionals to do, and pick whatever time frame you want to pick, but they are the heroes in this narrative. And they get up every day, and they certainly did over the pandemic, they put the needs of others before they put their own needs first. And 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.

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 and not you just saying things but you delivering.

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.

And I agree with you. I mean, 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 is 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. 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 gives them that confidence of picking a great partner.

It's interesting. As you were saying SOC 2, I was thinking gosh, I could come down with a list of alphabet soup of all the phenomenal things that we do that we've built because we care about having a broad, deep set of solutions. But what I'll say in shorthand is we really do take very seriously how we ensure that we are going to have the highest quality, innovative solutions for our healthcare organizations and do it in a very transparent, very strong governed way of how we operate the business.

For me, one of the other really great things that we do is we have an incredibly passionate group of team members at AMN who, when they leave their 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 Brothers 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.

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.' And individual missions may vary, but the common elements in the missions are really about quality patient care. And my hope five years from now is that AMN is really cited as the partner in helping those organizations achieve their missions.

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 going to be a mid-single-digit increase in demand driven by, I 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 creates 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 be in a really healthy place from a well-being standpoint so that they want to stay in? And then importantly, how do we continue to train up the next generation of clinicians? The same demographic that is driving the increase in healthcare, an 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 through scheduling or through workforce management and 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 by 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 healthcare systems.

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. 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 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.

Well, thank you for having me.