The new supply, especially of nurses is not keeping up with these increases, and the already constrained supply of the healthcare professionals is being impacted by retirement. So, the same demographics that are driving some of the increases in demand, are also driving the accelerated retirement of some of our health care professionals. And we also continue to see bedside clinicians leaving and taking less stressful jobs in health care and elsewhere. Beyond these supply/demand enduring imbalances, we’re seeing compensation expectations that have increased across all economic sectors, as high inflation has put upward pressure on wages. And so that really was happening throughout the pandemic. So, the conversations we’ve been talking to our clients about is, how do we help them attract and retain the workforce they need to serve their patients in a cost effective way.
So, enduring structural supply demand imbalance, continued upward, kind of leaving point from the pandemic of pressure on wages. And I’ll turn it over to Landry to talk a little bit about what we’re seeing more recently.
Landry Seedig: Yes. Hi, Kevin. So, we do as of today, we continue to see travel nurse and allied demand that is above pre-pandemic levels. It is down from some of the highs that we saw in the industry during some of those major COVID spikes. But you really have to think about at the peak, a lot of that demand as what we would kind of characterize as irrelevant, and it never did get filled by the overall industry. So you had demand spiking because of the extreme needs that exist there and the inadequate labor supply that exists. We’ve been predicting all along that we wouldn’t have as high of demand whenever things settle down. Yet, that demand still would be higher than pre pandemic levels, just to some of those — due to some of those universal issues on the labor within healthcare.
We have seen a couple of reports out there on demand in the marketplace that reflect what others might be seeing in the industry. And while our demand is down, as I just mentioned, our decline has not been as steep as what some of those reports suggest. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. I think one reason is that we stay true to our MSP customers over the past few years. And also the AMN team really did not chase any of the kind of what we would consider short-term business over the past couple of years. Lot of our conversations right now with clients are about reducing cost. But the reality is that their facilities remain highly understaffed even today. Bill rates, they’ve moderated for the most part, so clients are looking for decreases in their order volume really to try to accomplish a lot of their contingent labor expense targets.
And then, if you look at some of the underlying drivers of supply and demand, we expect that the pullback is going to be pretty short-term, and it’s really just overall not sustainable in the marketplace. So, we do expect to see a healthy demand environment as we progress throughout the year. There’s quite a bit of levers that we’re pulling right now, things like increasing our MSP fill rates, and then also returning our internal capture to some historical levels. We saw that dip a little bit throughout the pandemic whenever demand was really high and we were highly reliant on our supplier partners. And then the last think that that I’d mentioned is that we also have opportunities to focus in more on our non-MSPs, which we had previously been over the past couple of years.
Kevin Fischbeck: Okay. That’s fantastic. And I just do one more. I guess, Cary, whenever there’s a new CEO, always looking to see kind of what they’re focusing more on now. And I guess in your prepared comments, this go as one AMN thing kind of stuck out to me. Any way to size kind of what you see the opportunity as and how we should think about what that could mean? Thanks.
