AMN Healthcare Services, Inc. (NYSE:AMN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 8 of 10

Mark Marcon: Great. And then if I could just cheat and just ask one more. How much variance are you seeing in terms of the behavior among your 30 largest clients in terms of how they’re treating the need for cost discipline versus managing the workload on the floors?

Kelly Rakowski: Mark, it’s Kelly. I’m chuckling a little bit, because we had a lot of variation just in the makeup of those 30 across the country, different sizes, different settings, different communities that they serve. So on the one hand, it’s difficult to sort of peg consistency. But I will say from a €“ in general, Landry talked about it. We’re coming off a peak, so very high volume. There’s still the sensitivity around the financials, while I think the industry, particularly the hospital industry started to see improvement in their bottom line coming out of December, there’s still considerable financial strain on the systems, and they’re looking to their largest line item of expenses to be able to manage that going forward.

So, I would say there’s still that sensitivity to cost management, largely doing that through bill rates, through some of the urgent needs that Jeff just referred to. We’re seeing them turn to us to help them with predictive planning, utilizing our permanent resources to help them backfill so that they can bring back down those vacancy rates to more normal levels. So, high sensitivity the cost. At the same time, still a need around fulfillment. Landry mentioned there’s €“ they still need the nurses and their allied professionals on the floor, there’s challenges around retention. We hear most CHRO’s talk about, I don’t have a recruitment challenge, I have a retention challenge, I need to keep the people I have. And we know the biggest factor to retention is creating a safe positive work environment.

So they’re not €“ they don’t want to relinquish the use of contingent staff. So our teams just continue to work with them on all fronts, helping them from a short-term perspective, manage those costs, but also bringing to bear other capabilities and parts of our solution to help them with the long term. So I think that’s probably a very broad-brush universal kind of lay of the land mark.

Mark Marcon: Appreciate that, Kelly. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey. This is Ryan on for Jeff. I just wanted to ask a quick question on the tech and workforce. I’m just curious, what the drivers are for the segment for the year as you lap some challenging comps and some headwinds in VMS? And do you think the language service business can continue its strong trajectory and really drive the segment going forward? Thank you.

Jeff Knudson: Yes. Thanks, Ryan. I would say when you look at the year-over-year comparisons for the rest of the year that we would still expect language services to be growing in that high-teens rate as we move through the rest of the year. As you noted, VMS will have some very tough compares, particularly in the Q2 €“ beyond Q1 and the Q2 and Q3 time frame. And they’ll also be challenged sequentially in the second quarter as some of these bill rate dynamics that we talked about on Nurse and Allied play out in the front half of the year.

Page 8 of 10