What Adtalem’s chairman and CEO shared about the company’s unique approach to solving healthcare workforce challenges.
Adtalem Global Education Chairman and CEO Steve Beard participated in an executive conversation April 2 at POLITICO’s 2025 Health Care Summit, which convenes industry leaders, policymakers and others in Washington, D.C. Beard spoke with Rachel Loeffler, POLITICO’s executive vice president and general manager of professional business for North America.
Throughout the conversation he shared his perspective on the education landscape, healthcare and technology.
Providing Access to Education to Address Healthcare Workforce Challenges at Scale
“I think the current dynamic with growing [healthcare worker] demand and shrinking supply isn’t sustainable for the long term. We think we’re well positioned to help address that. Part of the way we do it is actually by expanding access to those careers. There’s a ton of scarcity across these programs in the United States today. In addition, those programs aren’t exactly flexible and accessible and friendly to students who need to go to school at night or on weekends, who are coming to their academic journeys later in life, who are changing careers. And one of the things we focus on is bringing accessible flexible programs to students to allow a different profile of students to pursue these careers which, by definition, grows the supply of clinicians that we all depend on.”
How Adtalem Creates Alternative Pathways to Healthcare Careers
“We often think about these professions—medicine, veterinary medicine, nursing—in the prism of this idea of higher education as being driven by high selectivity and prestige. And I think that’s incredibly valuable. But if we’re going to solve these workforce challenges at scale, we’re also going to have to think about alternative pathways into these professions for which selectivity and prestige just aren’t really helpful attributes.”
Improving Healthcare Outcomes with Culturally Competent Care
“The research on social determinants of health, health inequities, is well accepted: that people receive more compassionate and more competent care from folks with whom they can develop a relationship of trust, and very often those relationships are built on mutual affinity. As an African American, whose community is historically suspicious of healthcare, going into a clinic or hospital and having someone understand your background, your culture, your diet, the way you celebrate, goes a long way toward ensuring that those folks are getting the kind of care that they need. So, we’re just really proud to be able to bring that kind of diversity to the profession that stands to change the face of healthcare in a way that benefits all of us.”
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Technology in the Classroom
“I think we’re on the cusp of something that will dramatically change the way students consume content, dramatically change the way we support them in their academic journeys, and we're experimenting within a number of innovations around that currently. We’ve got AI tutors that support our students. We’re doing student advising and counseling with AI agents. We’re able to develop proprietary large language models that can take all of the academic content in a given program and make it accessible to students in a way that provides an adaptive learning experience.
“In addition, we’re partnering with folks who we think are on the cutting edge of these technologies in ways that will support conditions in the workplace. So, for example, we recently launched a partnership with Hippocratic AI to develop a curriculum for using their tools in care delivery and developing the first-ever AI certification for clinicians.”
View from the C-Suite: Benefits of AI for Nurses with Hippocratic AI Chief Nursing Officer Dr. Amy McCarthy.
Watch the full conversation.
For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com.
