← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Innovative Nursing Education and Workforce Solutions with Steve Beard Adtalem Global Education
00:12:05
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Transcript17 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Beckers Healthcare podcast series. It's fantastic to have you today. We're talking about training tomorrow's nurses today, rethinking workforce readiness in healthcare. And I'm very excited to be joined by Steve Beard, chairman and CEO of Italon Global Education. Steve, thanks for being here today. It's great to have you.
- [00:23]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:24]
A
To kick us off, we. We need some introductions. Can you share a little bit about yourself and your work in healthcare?
- [00:31]
B
Yeah. So, chairman and CEO, that's Allen Global Education, the country's largest healthcare educator. That having been said, I don't really come from a healthcare background. I'm a lawyer by training. Started my career in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. Spent a long time in human capital consulting and kind of stumbled my way into education. But it's been a fantastic opportunity for me. I love what we do, I love the people we do it for, and I love what our people go on to do for broader US Communities all over the United States. So lawyer by training, but a devoted advocate of education as an engine for social mobility and the importance of growing the healthcare workforce.
- [01:14]
A
Healthcare at heart, and certainly some great perspectives. As I was doing research for this podcast, there was one stat that really stuck out to me in a recent report. Found that 40% of nurses plan to leave the profession by 2029, which is an incredible number. From your perspective, what are some of the most pressing challenges health systems face in training and retaining nurses today? And how have those pressures evolved?
- [01:45]
B
Yeah, so I think you have to start with just the numerical asymmetry between supply and demand. Demand for nursing talent far outstrips supply, and that asymmetry is one we expect to grow for a variety of reasons, including the one you just highlighted, that demographic challenge. I think we've seen providers try to do less with more by way of nursing workforce, and that's resulted in some challenging labor strife. At the same time, that scarcity of supply has resulted in an acceleration of labor costs, a rise in wages for clinical talent, including nursing that's good for nurses, but a real challenge for a healthcare provider ecosystem that's already operating on relatively slim margins. So I think getting creative and thinking about how to address those workforce shortages is something that more and more providers of all stripes are taking a hard look at. And given our scale, we think we're a natural partner for providers in those conversations that think about different models that are a bit more reliable and potentially a Bit more cost effective than the spot market for talent.
- [02:55]
A
Yeah. And one of the key things, or one of the hardest things is that if when roles are filled right, we want to make sure that clinicians are ready to go. Day one, preparing practice ready clinicians. It's a, it's really important for sustainability overall. And you spoke about the models and sort of the creativity behind some of them and your partnerships. Obviously. What are some of the models or technologies that have you, you have seen that really made a big difference in getting nurses ready for patient care on day one. And do you have some examples of what that looks like?
- [03:26]
B
Yeah, three examples come to mind. The first is, you know, we make a real effort when we get employers involved in our academic programs to give students access to the care environment. For those employers, I think early exposure to that care environment goes a long way towards helping with readiness. Another thing we do is we've developed a number of specialty curricula. This is particularly true at Chamberlain University, which is the country's largest nursing school, where we have practice ready specialty focus tracks that give nurses deep exposure into certain subspecialties that make them more ready to practice in those specialties when they arrive at the care setting. That can be in home healthcare, that can be in oncology, it can be in perioperative care. We've got a number of those that we've developed in partnership with employers and we have another number of them that are in development as well. So that specialty focus brings folks closer to the specialties they'll be practicing in, makes them more ready to join that, that part of the workforce. And then the third thing we're working on is on the technology side and how can we help some of the more forward thinking developers of new technologies that are likely to transform the way we deliver care? How can we help clinicians get ready to utilize those tools? So we've got a partnership with Hippocratic AI where we've developed curricula for nurses to use their non diagnostic clinical tools. And we're currently working on a similar curriculum for physicians so that we can get folks ready to take full advantage of those tools, which we expect may alleviate some of the burdens of the workforce shortage and also may alleviate some of the burdens associated with more routine non diagnostic tasks in the care environment.
- [05:13]
A
Yeah, it's certainly a big part of the conversation right now. And you've touched on some of the approaches, some of the innovative approaches that you've taken in terms of partnerships, et cetera. I'd love to know More about a new partnership between Atalon and SSM Health. And I was wondering if you could touch on the collaboration, why it's unique and how is it addressing some of the challenges that we've touched on in the conversation so far?
- [05:37]
B
Sure. It's a partnership that we're really excited about. SSM is one of the largest providers in the country. They're a not for profit Catholic based network. They operate primarily in four states, Oklahoma, Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois. And we've entered into a partnership with them to stand up an aspiring nurses program in which we hope to deliver to them about 400 nurses a year and over time ramp that up to as many as 1200 nurses a year. And what's unique about the program is it brings together three of what we think are some of the important critical elements for the success of students and the success of employers with those students. The first is tuition assistance. The biggest barrier to attending nursing school remains the cost. And anytime an employer can participate in the payer mix, that gives them the opportunity to create a stickier relationship with the student, particularly if that student's going to agree to a service commitment in exchange for that tuition support. The second piece is Clinical Experience in the SSM environment. So the students that participate in this program will do their clinical hours on site at SSM where they get to know the environment, they get to know the protocols, they get to know the practitioners, and they get to become part of the community. And then the final piece is there's a, there's a direct placement pipeline from Chamberlain into ssm, which is an attractive feature for students and also gives SSM the first look at these emerging clinicians relative to other market participants. So it's more of a proprietary pipeline of talent into their system. We think it's a fantastic arrangement. We also think it's one that's scalable, as I mentioned, but also one that we believe we can repeat with other systems that are prepared to invest in that kind of proprietary pipeline of nursing talent.
- [07:31]
A
Looking at that trend then that you've just mentioned, or what we hope becomes a trend, how do collaborations between academia and healthcare providers really help shape that care delivery piece? And then if you could also touch on why that's so important for underserved or high need markets as well.
- [07:51]
B
Well, yeah, like I, I think traditional higher education environments have a lot of incredibly fantastic attributes, but they, they lack, I think, a couple of attributes that by definition limit their ability to scale up to meet the workforce demands. In healthcare. They're typically traditional programs full time programs, residential universities, they're typically priced accordingly and they have a value proposition that's rooted in selectivity and prestige. We, on the other hand, take a somewhat different model. Our programs are flexible, we can personalize them. We deliver instruction on campus, we deliver instruction virtually, we deliver instruction in hybrid modalities. We're also able to tailor curricula to meet the needs of health systems. And as a result, we're able to attract a broader pool of perspective clinicians to the model. So what that means is we can tailor our programs to meet the needs of systems like ssm. And I think that that's super important also because we're not a highly selective institution, and this is no disrespect to highly selective institutions. We take a holistic approach to admissions, which means that by definition we attract a much more diverse population of student not just racially and ethnically diverse, but economically diverse, geographically diverse. We have a number of folks that are veterans that grew up in homes where English wasn't the first language spoken. And what that means is that the systems that partner with us get access to a pool of talent that's, broadly speaking, more representative of the communities they serve. And we all understand the data on what that means by way of competent and compassionate care, addressing stubborn health inequities, and also helping these mission based providers be more responsive to the communities they're beholden to. So we think our model is much better suited to meeting those needs than traditional academic institutions that are part of an academic medical center.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah, it's not just filling one pipeline, as I'm thinking about this, it's filling multiple pipelines with multiple different factors and specialties, which is so important again, to be able to reach some of these areas that you've mentioned. Steve, so many great insights. Thank you so much for sharing them. I wanted to give you the floor here too. Is there anything else that we didn't touch on or any final thoughts that you'd like to share that might be important to our audience on this topic?
- [10:17]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. I was coming to this podcast from a meeting of healthcare executives where I was talking a bit about these kinds of partnerships. And one of the things I wanted to share with them when we were done with the Q and A was that even though we're not a healthcare company per se, we're an education company, we're absolutely rooting for healthcare and healthcare providers in particular, because the growth in healthcare employment and the growth in wages in healthcare have really allowed institutions like us to be a bona fide engine of social mobility for a whole population of folks for whom that makes a huge difference in their families and the communities that they serve. So even as providers grapple with all of the changes, including everything coming out of Washington in the way of Medicaid cuts and what that means for their ability to serve their communities, we are 1000% rooting for their success because their success, by extension, is the vehicle for our student success and that engine for social and economic mobility for students who are non traditional students. And their willingness to go on and serve communities at risk is just a really, really important dynamic in our ability to serve health care in a meaningful way. So I would leave your audience with that. We're a mission driven organization too. We're an academic and education based organization, but we are a huge advocate and fan of US healthcare.
- [11:42]
A
Healthcare@ Heart. Just like we started our podcast today. Steve, thank you so much for your insights and being here today. This was a fantastic conversation.
- [11:50]
B
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [11:52]
A
Absolutely. And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, Atel Global Education. You can tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page@beckershospitalreview.com.