Adtalem Global Education CEO sees ‘headroom for growth’

Since taking over as CEO of Adtalem Global Education four years ago, Steve Beard has shifted the company’s focus to training the healthcare workforce.

Beard began leading the company not long after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he says the timing turned out to be fortuitous.

“It was great to be here for the immediate post pandemic reset, and then to take advantage of all of the pent up demand for clinical workforce,” Beard tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

“We've been really pleased at our ability to grow our institutions, to graduate many more students, but we still believe our best work is ahead of us. So we're looking forward to the next four years, and we think they'll be even more impactful than the last four.”

Adtalem, which operates several higher education institutions, recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud to develop an AI credentialing program for healthcare professionals. The program is slated to launch next year.

In addition, Adtalem’s Chamberlain University is partnering with SSM Health on a new program to train more nurses.

Through its programs, Adtalem is serving over 90,000 students, and with health systems struggling to fill positions, Beard sees a greater role in preparing more people for the healthcare workforce.

“We want to serve as many students as we believe can be successful in our programs, and what we know is that there are more students who aspire to these careers than there are opportunities to pursue them,” Beard says. “So I think we've got a lot of headroom for growth.”

(See part of our conversation in this interview. The story continues below.)

Teaming with Google Cloud

Adtalem announced the partnership with Google Cloud in October to develop educational programs to help train doctors and nurses in using AI technologies.

“I think there's a growing sense that, particularly in non-diagnostic use cases, the technology’s ready to go, and that the real challenge or bottleneck will be the readiness of employees, clinicians, and the clinical workforce to utilize these tools,” Beard says.

The plan is to begin with “a basic AI healthcare fundamentals course,” he says.

Eventually, Beard says more specific courses will be designed for nurses, primary care providers, and physical therapy. Beard says he’d like to eventually provide offerings in behavioral health.

The courses will be designed to fit into busy schedules, he says.

“They're going to be short-form courses, typically self-paced, that folks can take at their convenience,” Beard says. “The goal is to make them comprehensive enough to raise the level of comfort and awareness for utilizing the tools, but not overly burdensome in ways that drive down adoption. So we're excited about what we'll be able to do there.”

The AI credential program will help clinicians and health systems, Beard says.

“I think we will be able to deliver clinicians who are AI-fluent, who have a real affinity for the ways in which the tool can augment them as caregivers,” he says. “And increasingly, we'll be helping employers create the same sort of AI fluency within their workplaces so that they can get the maximum return on the investments they're making in the technology.”

Beard says the partnership with Google Cloud offers a number of positive developments for Adtalem.

“It gives us an opportunity to do what we do best, which is train people to be able to be ‘day one’ ready when they arrive in practice,” Beard says. “And it also gives us an opportunity to learn about where AI is headed in health care from one of the largest and most respected technology players in the space.”

• Read more: Kaiser Permanente medical school CEO envisions new ways to train doctors

Training nurses

This year, SSM Health, the nonprofit Catholic health system, partnered with Chamberlain University to launch the Aspiring Nurse Program, which is designed to train nurses for careers in the health system. The program was created to train students in nursing and set them up for jobs at SSM Health after graduation.

The first cohort of students in Oklahoma began online courses in September, and students began courses in St. Louis, Missouri in November.

Beard says the “hypothesis was that if you paired tuition support with clinical training opportunities and a clear path to employment, that you'd actually grow the pool of interested applicants in the nursing profession.”

“We're thrilled by the uptake in the program. I know the folks at SSM are as well,” Beard says.

Amy Wilson, chief nurse executive for SSM Health, told Chief Healthcare Executive in August that she’s thrilled with the interest in the program.

“We really knew that our opportunity was to grow more individuals into the nursing profession, graduate more nurses. And so we've all done things like scholarships and other things to attract nurses to choose us, as opposed to another employer, but we wanted to do something different,” Wilson said.

SSM Health and Chamberlain expect the first class to graduate in 2028, and the goal is to see 400 graduates by 2029. As part of the program, SSM Health will also offer to repay the student loans of graduates.

Beard says he sees the potential to take the nursing program model launched at SSM Health to other health systems.

“We think it's a scalable, repeatable model that we look forward to introducing to other health systems around the country,” Beard says.

“It gives employers an early look at the students who would be working in their systems, and it gives aspiring clinicians an early look at the environments that they'd be working in,” he says. “And so you get a much better match between employer and employee, and we believe it'll go a long way towards bringing down some of the early turnover you see in nurses when they arrive at that first care environment.”

The nursing program and Adtalem’s other educational offerings are aimed at students who have been out of school for some time, but are interested in pursuing a better career.

“We serve what used to be known as the non-traditional student, the veteran, the working adult, the person switching careers, maybe folks who started a family and come to their academic journeys late in life,” Beard says. “We believe those folks can be incredibly successful academically and professionally.”