Cultivating Synergistic Environments & Teamwork with Liz Cunningham, Vice President of Digital Operations at AMN Healthcare

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Liz Cunningham, the Vice President of Digital Operations at AMN Healthcare, about the health care staffing industry of the future. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) What's going on, Liz?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:00:19) Hi, Joel. Nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) Nice to meet you. I love your last name. Your last name is the city I live in, so I assume that your family built the city.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:00:27) There's a city? There's a Cunningham City?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) I live in Cunningham, Tennessee, my friend. That's where I'm calling from right now. Yeah, no way.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:00:34) I need to go there. I need to go there. I met one time, I met this couple in this city called Rancho Bernardo, and they were on their honeymoon. And I asked them, I'm like, "Why are you here?" And they're like, "We're the Bernardos. We have to go to Rancho Bernardo for our honeymoon." I'm like, "It's like a little suburb," I mean, but maybe I gotta go to Cunningham, Tennessee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) There's a lot of farmland. That's what you'll see. But we're only about an hour away from Nashville, so there's some fun stuff to do.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:01:01) Nice. Very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) Yeah. And so you're out in Dallas?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:01:04) Yeah, based in Dallas right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) So were you born and raised in Dallas, or no?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:01:09) No, I'm a San Diegan, true and true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) Okay. Alright. How did you make your way out to Dallas?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:01:14) With AMN, actually. I've been with AMN for almost eleven years coming up. So I've moved around. Yeah. So I'm out here for AMN. We used to have our headquarters in San Diego, so it was a nice transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) Did you start in digital transformation technology leadership there, or did you work your way up over the eleven years?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:01:36) Yeah. So it was funny. I was prepping for our conversation, and one of the things I was a little nervous about was, you know, hey, I'm kind of a tech fraud. Well, not really a fraud, but I'm not a technologist by nature. So, you know, I actually am a sociologist out of college and got into AMN in marketing. Kind of got my foot in the door. So I came out of college during the recession, so there wasn't a lot of stuff available. Right? I worked for my dad for a couple years and then in a nonprofit for a little bit, and I just wanted to get my foot in the door with a big company. So I started as a low-level marketing specialist about eleven years ago and have just kind of worked my way into operations and then from operations into technology and then from technology into kind of the digital transformation space. So not necessarily a straight path one way, but a crooked path that got me to where I wanted to be eventually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) I love it. It's almost always that way, right? And I'm curious to know, like, alright. So you join low-level marketing. You end up making your way to the top of the technology side of the business. Obviously, you have a huge professional background in sociology, so understanding people. How did applying that, or how did you go about building relationships and becoming useful to people and identifying these opportunities so you could make your way up?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:03:01) Yeah. I think it's interesting that you said "becoming useful," because that's what I would say. You know, it's funny. I feel like sometimes people think that you always just deserve a seat at the table, right? Because you have a certain title, certain role, you just get a seat at the table. And I look at it a little differently of, you know, if you provide value and use to internal stakeholders, they invite you and they want you in the conversation. So, you know, when I started, I really just started diving in where help was needed most and where the biggest problems were and, you know, was always curious, always asking, you know, "Hey, can you show me this?" Or, "Hey, I heard you have this problem. Can you sit me down?" Show me what you're doing, sitting with a recruiter or someone in finance and just understanding. So I think just gaining knowledge and being useful just kind of kept me growing. And then, you know, I know it's a little bit cliche, but you say, you know, get your internal board of directors. I just made a really good network of leaders around AMN that were interested in my career growth and gave me opportunities that I probably wouldn't get if I was applying for them externally. And I was able to take them and run with them and just continue to grow that way. So, you know, you just gotta add value. Add value and learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:09) And are you currently leading a team?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:04:11) Yeah. I have about, right now, about 150 people on my team, and we span across product management, product development, UX, digital marketing, and actually customer support. Customer experience also falls under there. So we really kind of have a good handle on making sure we've got a seamless digital experience from anywhere from support with an issue to finding a job, contacting a recruiter. It's all kind of under one roof with my team right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) Oh, that's interesting. So you're handling the entire lifecycle of the customer's digital experience interaction with AMN Healthcare.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:04:47) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:49) That sounds like a pretty fun job.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:04:50) It is fun because you get to experiment with new technology and new ideas, but then you also get to operationalize something that's real to your customers with customer support and how the business operates there. So it's been an interesting journey. And I think, you know, back to the whole sociology thing, you know, having that kind of empathy for the customer and having my entire team being driven to be completely clinician-centric and thinking about what are the pain points of our users, how are we solving them digitally, how are we removing barriers for them. It's a really good synergy where we can get some pretty awesome work done pretty quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:30) And so when you're running this team of 150 people, obviously you understand this concept of how you were able to grow and become valuable and useful. So, you can correct me if I'm wrong, make an assumption of statement. So you would be looking for that in your next generation of leaders within that 150 pool. That's great. But can you influence and encourage it, or no? Do you just sit back and watch it emerge from there and then invest in those people?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:05:54) Meaning their talent?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:56) Yeah. Like, if you're looking, because you have to raise up the next generation, right, in your position, you have to always be looking for the next leaders within that group set. Is there anything you can do to encourage that, or does it just naturally emerge and you see the people doing it and then you just decide to invest in them for the people who are doing it?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:06:13) Yeah. So I have a couple different ways that I approach that with my team. I'm very honest and transparent with my team where, you know, I tell them if you don't raise your hand for something, it doesn't mean that someone's thinking about you for that next role. So if you're curious or you wanna learn something else, you always need to be asking. So first, I kind of put a little bit of onus on them to raise their hand when they're bored, when they wanna do something else. I always tell them, if there's one day that you wake up and you're bored and you're watching the clock, call me immediately because I will give you something else to do. So there's kind of that drive that I'm trying to push on them. But then on the flip side, you know, if I see some potential or I see someone that I think has opportunity to learn in a different area that's maybe not their area of expertise, I'll just put them on an initiative. So our team really works in more hybrid pods where I don't care if your specification for your role is, say, SEO if you're on a digital marketing team. I'll go put you on a product team for a quarter, see how you like it, see if that expands your horizon. So it's interesting. A lot of my product leaders, one of the guys, he was a reporting analyst that I hired, you know, when I was running operations a couple of jobs ago that was just so smart and, you know, had a lot of different talents. And I asked him one day, "Do you wanna do product management?" He's like, "I guess I'll try it." And, you know, jumped over, started from the bottom there, and is now a manager. You know, I've got someone who is from learning and talent development. She was a trainer, and I just thought she was so smart and just so good at solving problems and connecting dots that I brought her over to product as an example. So it's kind of a combination of telling them to speak up, but then also identifying talent and just throwing people into a new opportunity and seeing, you know, what they think of it and if they can be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:01) How often do you get that call? It's like, "Hey, Liz. I'm bored."

(Liz Cunningham at 00:08:05) I just actually had a call like that with one of my team members the other day. He was raising his hand for another job. And I asked him, I said, "Hey, you know, this is a parallel move. What's going on?" And he's like, "Honestly, I've just been doing the same thing for three years." It's like, "Okay. Well, then let's have a conversation." And nine times out of ten, I'm able to, you know, shuffle work around and put that person on something that's more exciting to them and retain and solve that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) I see. So do you see that a lot? Do you see people getting bored with the repetitive nature of the work?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:08:40) Not with our company so much. There's always, you know, a million different projects and investments that we're making in the tech space that there's always something new to work on. I think where I see it is I feel like around that two-year mark when someone's in a role, they start to get an itch if it's the same thing that they're doing every day. And I feel like that's the part where you have to be kind of most cognizant about what's going on, even when we do engagement surveys across the company, right? I can typically see where there's a red spot in my engagement, and it's someone that's been in their role for about two or three years that has kind of a growth acumen. So, yeah, I do actually see that around that time frame, but I'm usually able to give them something more exciting without even having to do a job change or, you know, a new role or move to a different department sometimes. Just changing up their day-to-day monotony, I find, you know, helps increase that retention and engagement with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) I wanna talk a little bit about the product and technology. So you said that you're always trying to make the digital experience for the customer better, but who is the customer? Is it physicians? Are individuals that are logging in through portals to book meetings? What exactly do you guys build?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:09:48) Yeah. So for AMN Healthcare, you know, we have two sides of customers, right? We have customers that are clients or health systems, but then we also have customers that are health care professionals. So in this context, when I'm talking about the digital experience, I'm talking about our health care professionals, which can, you know, range from a physician to an allied professional like an occupational therapist, speech language pathologist, to nurses. So that whole spectrum of health care professionals is really our target of who we're trying to create a better experience for when it comes to, you know, workforce management and finding a job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:25) Okay. So that's the general idea of AMN Healthcare, to help find, place these individuals?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:10:31) Yeah. I mean, holistically, we're a workforce technology company that also has a staffing component. So we have the people kind of curation and engagement component, but then we also provide clients with workforce technology solutions to help them optimize their workforce, whether it be contingent, permanent, per diem, etcetera. So things like vendor management solutions, things like AMN Passport, which is our self-service app for our clinicians, scheduling solutions, etcetera. So, you know, just helping them manage the workforce so that they can focus on, you know, the patient care and the outcomes is really kind of our value proposition when it comes to working with our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Okay. And so I'll give you some background on me. So my brother is a family doctor. And so he's down in Florida, and he's got patients that range from small children all the way up to the elderly. And then my stepmom, she owns a clinic. They have about ten doctors. They're more like a specialty cash pay, live your, you know, best peak of health type situation, and they have a staff, I think, about 40. Would either of those two individuals be using your software?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:11:41) So if your, would say your stepmom has a clinic? Yeah. So if she has a clinic, a smaller clinic, that would typically be someone that's maybe working with our per diem division, for example, if they just need help covering shifts because it's such a small staff. So they might work with us to go ahead and, you know, fill holes in their schedule. If it was, you know, maybe she had three or four different clinics, she might be using one of our vendor management technologies where she's saying, "Hey, I have workforce needs all the time, and all I'm gonna do is just enter them in this technology and AMN, your systems and your people are gonna disperse them, talent pools, get people interested, and get them back to me. And I'll approve them and say that they can work here." Um, but it's kind of that easy for her to say, "Here's an order. Get it filled. Let me distribute it out." Okay, on the physician side, the physician side is where we kind of partner from a locum tenens perspective or a permanent staffing perspective. So locum tenens is like per diem for physicians, and there's a lot of scheduling and complexity when it comes to that side of the house. So they might be interacting with us for a scheduling solution. They might also use a vendor management solution, but then also we'll, you know, staff and connect them with physicians that can come in and fill in if your family member ever wants to take a vacation and needs coverage. So those would be some use cases there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) Awesome. Do you work with the larger, like, I'm in Nashville, right? The largest industry here, people think it's music. It's not. It's health care. HCA is a behemoth that's based in Nashville. Would you work with their hospital systems, or do those types of companies have their own tools? How does that work?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:13:25) Yeah. It depends. You know, across the gamut, various health systems have either exclusive partnerships with a staffing company, or they have technology that they're using to distribute. So it depends. We have our own proprietary VMS that is embedded into a lot of health systems nationwide, but there are also other vendor management technologies out there that will work through, like a Fieldglass, for example, that may be embedded in a health system already. So we can integrate to existing technologies, or a health system can implement our technology to support them with their staffing needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:58) That's awesome. Thanks for helping me just try to wrap, because I have this, you know, somewhat close experience because they're my family, and so I see it happening. And I understand some things, but also, I spent a year traveling with my, I've got a family, wife, three kids. We spent a year in an RV doing a one-year camping trip around the United States. I met so many travel nurses and found out about how that works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:22) They'll go on these apps, and the apps will dispatch them, and they'll go do two months here or six weeks there, and then they'll be in different cities. So there's a lot of travel nurses in the RV parks because a lot of them buy the RVs and travel around and do this. And so I was just trying to connect those dots for myself.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:14:37) Yeah. I mean, that's definitely our core audience on the health care professional candidate facing side is exactly that. And creating this seamless digital experience for them is so important because, you know, you and I are sitting at a desk. You know, I don't know where you are, but we're sitting at a desk right now. And, you know, for my corporate job, sometimes I can work from home. Sometimes I'm in the office, but it's consistent. Right? And these nurses are so brave. You know, they're packing up every 13 weeks. They're finding a new RV park.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:15:10) They're finding an Airbnb to stay in. They're calling their friends. They're going into completely different hospitals with different procedures and different EMR systems and different time entry systems. And that's a lot. Changing a job one time every couple years is a lot. But doing that every 13 weeks and learning all those new things puts a lot of pressure on those clinicians. So my goal and AMN's goal is to try to create everything around that abnormality every 13 weeks with something that feels very normal and very seamless for them as it relates to, you know, interacting with an app, finding jobs, talking to your recruiter, getting paid, learning about the next opportunity. So I mean, that's really our target audience is your fellow RV parkers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58) I'll share a tiny little story. We were working with this company. I can't remember their name. They're a medical company like you guys. So we do our show, we do my show, but we make 20 other shows for enterprises. Right? It's Microsoft or whatever. They'll come to us and say, hey, we want a show. And so this medical company came to us and they're like, hey, we want to do a show for travel nurses so that they can listen to it while they're traveling around, a podcast, and it'll help us with recruiting. So we went through this whole creative strategy session. We came up with this brilliant idea for this travel nurse podcast, things that travel nurses listen to. That way, they would own their audience and everything and be able to create this interesting funny content about, you know, get these nurses hosting it. Right? And then the whole project got canceled.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:16:40) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:40) And I was so upset because I was like, I know the audience because I, you know, spent time with them. We were doing research for it. We were looking in Reddits and stuff to see what these nurses are talking about. They are hilarious. They are hilarious people.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:16:55) They, yes, they, I totally agree. We get, you know, we've got a couple of TikTok channels, and we actually have some, we have a user generated content feature on our app where we give prompts and they do a little snippet of their response to the prompt and they share it with each other. And you get some, their experiences are so different than most people because of what they're doing, and they just have some great stories to tell. So they're a really good group of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:22) Yeah. I found, you know, about I think three years ago, I ran into this person that recommend that I, I was sharing this brief story about how when I met a bunch of people, as I've done 700 something of these interviews. But after around 200 or 300, I started to understand people in a different way. And not everybody has that experience. And someone actually wrote a book called Meet 100 People. You've done this clearly networking and all of that. But how you understand people grows as you meet and interact in a meaningful way with more people, not just have a checkout line or something of that nature. But as we're talking about this, I'm thinking, okay, this makes complete and total sense, this idea of meeting a bunch of people. And I was curious from your perspective, have you met 100 plus people, and would you recommend it as far as a helpful skill to grow your career and interacting with individuals?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:18:15) I feel like I could say I've definitely met 100 people, and I do think it's important. You know, it's interesting. I'm very extroverted by nature, but networking is something that's always been uncomfortable to me. Networking in the sense of you go to a network event. Right? And it's something that I've had to almost force myself to get used to. But I think, you know, it's less about meeting someone and immediately talking to them about, here's my resume, I'm awesome, let's connect on LinkedIn and maybe we can help each other find jobs one day. I think it's less about that. I think it's more about, you know, just genuine connections and talking to people.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:18:58) I've met some amazing people by just, you know, sitting at myself at a bar and talking to the person next to me and finding out what they do and just, you know, learning about them, who they are, or even, you know, going on a walk. You know, I'm always someone that waves or says hi to people. I know it makes everyone super uncomfortable. I think I got that from my dad. My dad used to be the guy that would run a marathon and if you ran next to him, he would talk to you until you started either to run faster and get away from him or to stop and start walking because he just wanted to learn more about people.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:19:30) And I feel like he really pushed that down onto me where I just want to get to know people that I meet and I enjoy striking up a conversation with about anyone. Yeah. You can ask my husband about that. He loves it. But I'm a bit of a workaholic, but also that kind of goes into, you know, pushing yourself and continuing to move forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) Well, you're in good company. I describe myself as a family first workaholic. Right? That's a...

(Liz Cunningham at 00:19:56) That's a good description. I like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) Yeah. Because I have a wife and three kids, and the kids, you know, you have to pay attention to them. Right? So it's, and here's another thing I found too as far as growing and leading people and with myself having kids and going to that stage, is that when things are right at home, whether it's just your kids or your relationship, whatever your home life looks like socially, when things are good there, work works so much better.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:20:24) Yeah. I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) Yeah. So I'm always, I find myself often when people are, you know, performance issues or whatever it is, first trying to figure out, hey, how's life going? Because you're a top performer in things. You're not performing top right now, and I want to know what's going on. Do you ever have to do any of that? Do you have any tips for me there?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:20:46) Yeah. I don't remember what podcast I listened to this on, but someone made a comment that, you know, they were trying to kind of continue to grow in their career and were working so hard, but realized that they were working so hard at avoiding dealing with their life and their life situations. And were almost masking the work and the reason they had to work with I want to keep moving up, but really were avoiding kind of dealing with their life and what's going on. And I feel like we as professionals need to just almost gut check yourself every once in a while of, okay, do I really need to be checking emails till 10:00 at night? Can I take a break and go have dinner with my husband?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:21:31) Can I go, you know, meet friends for happy hour? I just think sometimes you get so mired up in the work that you don't really realize why you're doing it or if you're actually running away from something or running towards something. And I thought that that was a really interesting nugget that I've taken with me to just check yourself and make sure you're not just avoiding something else by doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:51) Yeah. So you're an executive in this space. Are you going around and speaking at conferences or writing or doing anything publicly?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:21:57) Not as much as I probably should be. But, you know, I'm really honestly focused most of my day on building a product that our health care professionals will love. And I spend a lot of time talking to our health care professionals, working with my teams and motivating them to learn new interesting capabilities we can bring to them. So, you know, there's been a lot of changes in the health care market since COVID. Right? So this year really has been a year of us kind of redefining and accelerating our experiences so that we can create something that has a good amount of stickiness so that clinicians, you know, want to work with AMN and have a full kind of breadth of opportunities. So a lot more internal focus this year, but as we continue to grow the product and get it out there, we'll definitely start to talk about it more publicly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:50) How do you build a product that people love?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:22:53) I mean, you have to first start with the person that you want to use it. So when we actually first built our app, we were one of the first kind of health care staffing recruitment apps out there in the space a couple years ago. Now it's pretty heavily saturated, which is a whole another challenge to face. But we actually, you know, a lot of product teams, most product teams hopefully do design thinking. Right? And a lot of that is internal and, you know, you get your corporate people together and you do a design thinking session, you come up with problems you want to solve. We actually did that with clinicians when we started out and really talked to them about, hey, what are the pain points you deal with every day searching for jobs, trying to be a health care professional, doing credentialing, doing time entry? And we built our roadmap based on their feedback. And then we have consistently, for multiple years, done monthly voice of customer programs where we're either getting feedback on existing capabilities or our roadmap for the next year.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:23:51) So that clinician feedback is our number one priority. Making sure that that is aligned is the most important thing. And I think that's why our app's been successful. I mean, we have, you know, one of the highest app store ratings out there and with the most reviews, and clinicians love our app. And, you know, that leads to better business for AMN and it's a win-win across the board for us and for the health care professionals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) Do you, is it mostly staffing and vendor management, or do you get into the EMR stuff?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:24:24) We don't do EMR implementations or manage sort of any sort of EMRs, but we do interact with EMRs when it comes to integrating with data. So whether we're leveraging EMR data to help with predictive analytics or predictive scheduling based on, you know, procedures we're seeing, things like that. So it's more about leveraging the data for predictive workforce needs, but less about the EMR technology itself from an AMN scope perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:52) Interesting. I hope that industry consolidates and creates better products and then they see it easier. Yeah.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:25:00) That's one of the pain points for our clinicians. Right? I mean, just imagine you showed up to work every day and you've got a different EMR system and you've got a different, you know, you have Kronos time entry, which most folks have, but, you know, you have to enter time this way here and this way here, and you've got a different way to access drugs in the pharmacy, and you have a different code and a different, it's, you know, it's not like we have our Office 365 apps or if you use the Google Suite, right, where it's on your laptop and your phone and anywhere you go, it's the same. It's totally different for these clinicians. They're not, in their day to day life, they're just not experiencing something seamless, and that's what we have to do as their employer on the flip side, make everything else seamless for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) Oh, yeah. When I, my brother's office, and he's like, yeah. So we VPN into this thing and then there's this app on the Windows that we VPNed. And I was like, man, I thought they stopped doing this in the nineties. I was like, why, where's the cloud software you can connect to from anywhere? He's like, oh, they don't do it like that in this space. I was like, oh, all right. Yeah. I get it. There's all sorts of stuff in the military and then in the medical field, and it takes time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:11) But thankfully, thankfully, we have great people like you. You get to use those types of, you know, technology in your day to day life. Right? And you understand the ease of it and the use of it, and then you get to go build technologies to get us one step closer to that in our work lives as well.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:26:27) Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. And I think sometimes when you're building a new product, you get so mired into, okay, what is my singular business outcome I'm trying to drive with it? And I think with something like an app, right, because that's, you know, primary thing that my team works on, there's a million of them out there. Everyone offloads their apps that they don't use, you know, after 30 days automatically on most phones. Right? So you think about what's important to them in the health care professional interaction, but then you also have to think about all the other apps they're using day to day and try to find parallel experiences. So it might not feel related whatsoever, but how often do people buy a house?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:27:06) I don't know. Once every 10 years. Right? But how often are people interacting with a Zillow or a Redfin app? Actually, monthly, if not weekly. And so, you know, in your initial intention, you could say, oh, I'm going to build an app to help people buy houses. Right? Okay. Great. You could make something transactional that has an easy way to do a mortgage application and to, you know, do your signatures and you're done.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:27:29) Or you could think about it in a way where, no, I'm actually going to be this app that is a point of conversation and spikes curiosity when I'm driving through a new city and I'm like, oh, how much would it cost to live here? Or, oh, that's a cool place. Let me go see the inside of it. And, you know, Zillow went from, okay, you know, it could have been an app where you just did a mortgage application to something that you're engaging with day to day just because it's interesting to you. But then when you actually do want to buy a house, your Zillow app is on your phone because you're using it all the time, and they get that transaction. And I think what we're trying to do in our space is change the paradigm to not just be about, yeah, we're an app that if you want to be a travel nurse, you can, you know, get a job and move forward. You know, I want us to be this kind of talent network for health care professionals where we are available to them at any kind of career arc. So, you know, maybe that same person in the future is looking at, oh, how much does a condo here cost?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:28:23) But, oh, I'm curious. Do they have shifts here I could pick up if I wanted to stay here for a couple weeks? And then come to our app and look at a per diem shift? Or they could say, oh, I'm curious what the salary of a perm nurse is over here, and they could see perm jobs, or they could see, you know, what types of hospitals are in this area. And I want us to start thinking about that experience in a more fluid way with other type experiences, because then we just get a really engaged network. And then at the end of the day, we've got this great pool that our clients can access in a flexible way that ultimately gets them the outcomes they want as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) No, I love it. I get excited when I meet cool people like you. You mentioned something very specifically earlier about your team learning new capabilities. Right? How do you help your team learn new capabilities that ultimately you get a better product?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:29:16) Couple different ways. I can give you something more tactical, which people don't have to copy this. I'm not saying it's a silver bullet whatsoever. But, you know, my team will tell you this, but I make it a point where we have everyone together once a week for the same hour, and we've done it since I've run this team for the last couple of years. And every week, someone else actually hosts the huddle. They're totally responsible for it. I never talk half the time. Well, they'll tell you I talk because I ask questions, but I'm never hosting it. But what they have to do is every host has to, for the first fifteen minutes, pick a new topic that they're gonna teach everyone else about. So we force each other to learn something.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:30:00) So they'll pick a topic in technology and they'll teach the broader group about it. So sometimes it might be a capability on one of our platforms. Like, the other week, someone presented on one of our CDP or omnichannel platforms. It actually has some embedded AI, conversational AI, where based on the demographic of the person that we're talking to, we can change the tone to be like talk to them like a Gen Z or talk to them like a Gen X. And it just changes the entire messaging and uses nomenclature that's more applicable to whatever generation. So that's just a little nugget, and it got everyone thinking about, okay, how can I use that in digital marketing? How can I use that here? So we teach each other, and that's something that we've just held consistent. So that's one piece. And then, you know, the traditional, like, we've got podcasts we share. We have Gartner licenses. We're constantly doing kind of competitive and indirect and non-direct research and just trying to stay up on trends. But that first one is just a routine that you get in, and the team wants to learn something new every week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:04) Break it down a little bit more tactically. So you run this. You find the different host that do this. So you just have, like, a weekly meeting, and then the work on your side is they understand the format because they're a part of it, and then you just find a different person to host it each week?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:31:19) So every year, we reset like how we're gonna run it. But so this is how we're running it this year. But literally in December last year, we create a calendar for the entire year of who's hosting every week. And based on our engagement survey scores, we and what feedback is, we'll adjust what's in the meeting. So this year was all about learning something new. So the host does literally the particular PowerPoint. Sometimes it's a video. Sometimes it's something more interactive for the first fifteen minutes. And then we just do round robin updates. So we've got, you know, a running live notebook where everyone just talks about, like, what's one thing you accomplished this week, what's a risk that you wanna bring up, and then what's your primary focus for the week.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:32:03) So each kind of department goes around. And then the last fifteen minutes, that host spends reintroducing the next host. So what we love about it is because, you know, we're a big team and we're spread out, it kind of forces people to get to know someone. So, you know, maybe Joel, I met you one time in a meeting for fifteen minutes and I haven't talked to you for six months. I'm gonna interview you about your family and your favorite place to travel, and every kind of host comes up with a fun way to introduce them.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:32:34) So, you know, I had one of my guys do a video that was like a mock on the Between Two Ferns and literally did an interview of the person. And we had another guy that did like a, what's the game where you flip all the people over, Guess Who? Is that what it is? Yeah. We did like a Guess Who to figure out who the person was. So people just get really creative, and it's just a fun way to still garner engagement in sort of a hybrid virtual world, but then also learn something new and, you know, give updates and make sure we all know what each other are working on so we can have each other's back if, you know, someone's not in a meeting or missing out on an initiative.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) That is awesome. It sounds like you guys have a lot of fun over there.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:33:10) We do. I really, I love my team. I can't speak more highly of them. It's a great group of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) Well, this is a great point for a call to action. If people, technologists out there interested in joining your team, we've got people that design technology product, the whole spectrum listen to the show. Are you hiring currently? And if so, where should they go to learn more?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:33:29) Yeah. At AMNHealthcare.com/careers. Always have our different opportunities on there and, you know, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You know, it's not a fake call to action. Like, please message me, send me something that you're interested in. We're always looking at contractors too for some projects that we're standing up. So always have opportunity to think about, you know, ways to get involved with AMN and some of our technology products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) That's amazing. We have a few minutes left here, but is there anything that we didn't get to that we needed to specifically hit for a call to action here?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:34:03) I think one of the things we were gonna talk about, but we don't actually have to, it's up to you, was about some of the, like, AI capabilities we're leveraging on the app. But we don't have to go there if you don't wanna.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) Let's do it.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:34:14) Go there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) Yeah. Yeah. Are you kidding me? I love technology. I mean, look, the ChatGPT thing exploded earlier this year. It's on everybody's radar. Have you implemented anything in any production stuff? Are you running any experiments currently with it?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:34:29) Yeah. So we are, we have launched actually quite a few things into production, and I think they're the less fun things. I mean, we do have some fun things around, like, you know, conversational AI and chatbots. And we've got, you know, job matches where they take preferences from clinicians and we send you jobs that, you know, you would like based on your preferences or maybe future preferences. But I think one of the more, like, nerdy healthcare things that we've been doing are around credentialing. So, you know, I think the things that, you know, we keep talking about all these different things a clinician has to do to start an assignment. And one of the things they have to do is actually get credentialed at every single hospital they go work at. So similar to your family member, if you went to work at a different hospital, you'd have to get privileged there to work, which basically every time is a verification of all your nursing licenses, you do a drug screen, you get a TB test. You approve all your vaccinations. You show all your case logs. And it's a very, very manual, very costly expense for clients and for AMN, and then also just really painful for clinicians.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:35:36) It's literally like doing a mortgage application every 13 weeks. So what we've been trying to do is leverage AI to better read documents and read, index, and then actually verify documents. So anything from, like, identity verification to licensure to, you know, creating something that will read a vaccine card with any doctor's handwritten scribble on it and say, yes, this is what it is and you have, you know, these two vaccines and you're good to go, to really just try to make it easier for the clinician and then reduce the overhead on our side to have to manually go through that. So that's, you know, less sexy because it's, you know, document verification, but it actually has been a really useful tool for us to create efficiencies across the board for clients, clinicians, and AMN internal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:27) That sounds like a huge cost savings.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:36:30) Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, and it has a lot of other utilizations. I mean, if you wouldn't believe this, but people still, you know, do handwritten time cards if they're picking up a shift. So, you know, maybe we don't have to have someone interpret that anymore. We can just leverage different technology to read the time card and pump it into a system versus someone keying it in and, you know, reducing some of those errors too. So lots of opportunity where there's a lot of still handwriting happening in the medical space that you maybe think was solved by every EMR out there. But there's still a lot of that that helps us, you know, just be more efficient.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Is there anything that you're excited about that's coming soon that you can talk about?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:37:11) Yeah. Well, I can talk about something we just actually launched, which I do think is gonna be a big differentiator in the market right now. I think, you know, you'll hear staffing companies talk about, like, a gig economy. Right? And they'll have these apps where nurses, they'll say it's like the Uber and, you know, a nurse can just pick up a shift whenever they want to, but that's usually kind of a standalone thing. And then you'll have travel nursing apps and then you'll have your, you know, LinkedIn for your permanent career, etcetera. So we actually just launched a pilot here recently where we've integrated all those different job types into one experience. So someone can pick up shifts very easily at the same time, you know, when they're working a travel assignment or look at perm jobs. And I think that's gonna be one of our differentiators because we will kind of officially be that lifecycle management solution and, you know, really start to expand the possibilities for these clinicians that are looking for more flexible opportunities to see them all and find them all in one space. So I'm super excited about that.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:38:14) Just a small pilot to start out with, but we're quickly expanding to additional clients here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Oh, nice. So, like, you're aggregating these opportunities?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:38:23) Yeah. We, well, we use our VMS. Right? So basically, think about, like, we've got this large technology where, you know, clients enter their orders, and we wanna connect it to our talent network so that there's a kind of that direct connection between what our clients are asking for and what our clinicians can see. And when it comes to picking up shifts, that's the most tedious manual process there is. It's a nurse manager sending an email to someone who puts it in technology who then calls three nurses to say, can you pick up this shift? So now we've kind of integrated the VMS with the talent network on Passport where those shifts just get directly to people that are matched to them. They get alerted. They can pick them up up to four hours before a shift actually starts, and show up and work it. So efficient for the hospitals and, you know, additional work for the clinicians, you know, where they want it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) I saw this happening seven years ago or so in the restaurant industry. So I saw that the way I, I don't know where I was. I was at a restaurant, but the way I heard the staff talking about work was less of I work at Outback or Chili's or Applebee's and more of I've got three shifts at Outback, two at Chili's, four at Applebee's in the next, you know, week or two. And for me, that just piqued my interest. So I started, I walked over to them. I started talking to them. I was like, hey, explain this to me. My parents did own a restaurant growing up when I was a kid, so I had some interest. I was like, explain this to me, like, how does this work? And they're like, yeah. There's this app. And, like, I put my availability. And so they were doing this in the restaurant industry, or I at least started seeing them do that a few years ago. Have you seen that at all in the restaurant industry or no?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:40:03) I haven't actually heard of it, but I'm wondering if it's, you know, that that is, you know, if I think about that, I'd be curious if the restaurants are doing it where each of those restaurants act as the individual employer or if there's some sort of employer on the backend that's actually like a third-party staffing agency that's putting them there. I'm gonna look it up after this. I'm gonna go look it up because it's a great parallel use case. So I'm gonna educate myself after this on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) Yeah. I have, I can't tell you. I don't know. I just heard them talking about it and that caused me, like, some interest, and apparently, I was like, well, how do you handle, like, knowing the menu? Like, well, you have to, like, work that you have to be, like, approved and, like, on their list and, like, have gone through the training and then and then they just post the shifts and you can pick them up. Because if everybody is, like, posting their shifts individually and there is just one platform that they happen to all be using because they're using the same POS management platform, then from the perspective of the employee, they can just pick and choose across what they wanna do, which I think is really interesting that it went that way.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:41:08) Yeah. I mean, it's a great parallel. I mean, that that's our goal for our clinicians, right, is is the value prop to them is it's a one-stop shop, and then the value prop to the client is that you access this network. It's all just about, you know, back to kind of the AI example of, like, well, how fast can we get you credentialed at all these places? Right? Because because, you know, similar to what you said with, like, Applebee's. Right? Well, you gotta go through orientation. You gotta know the menu. You gotta know the POS. Like, you have to know all that before you can work here. Hospitals are the same way. You have to have your orientation. You gotta be credentialed. You gotta know all of that. So we have to build that pool so that more people can start to grab those shifts at the same time. So lots of work to be done on the healthcare side because I think there's a lot more barriers to entry to have, like, a full kind of true gig economy. But this balance between flexible multiple types of work, I think, is where we'll end up landing where a clinician might be perm full-time and is on, you know, working four days a week, but picks up an extra shift on a Saturday because, you know, they have nothing to do. They wanna make some extra money, or they're on a travel assignment. In between their two travel assignments, they just wanna go to a new city for a couple weeks and pick up some shifts and make some money while they're doing that. So I see it being this kind of blended experience that creates flexibility that people are looking for in their work-life balance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:29) That's awesome. What is the thing in your personal life that you're most excited about right now?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:42:35) That is a great question. What am I most excited about in my personal life? See, I did the thing where I've been talking about work the whole time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) Well, this is the point. We're at work right now. We are at work.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:42:47) I know. Right? Well, I love the holidays. So, I mean, we're super close, but, you know, my husband's dad is like a professional Santa. So Christmas starts for us right around Thanksgiving. Oh, yeah. He's an amazing Santa. So we actually, you know, we dressed as, like, Buddy the Elf and Jovie in a parade last year. Yeah. We were on a float behind him, and his mom is Mrs. Claus, and that was super fun. And then my family is just huge, and we have such a fun time. Like, we do a champagne walk, turkey trot around our neighborhood where all the neighbors come out, and it takes us, like, four hours to do a one-mile walk. But it's just I just love the holidays. I love my family so much. So I am excited about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Nice. And this has been absolutely fantastic, Liz.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:43:42) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) I've enjoyed it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Liz Cunningham at 00:43:45) It's exciting. Yeah. It's my first time doing a podcast interview. So thank you for having me.

(Liz Cunningham at 00:43:53) I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:54) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.