AMGA partners with Practicing Excellence to bring AI-powered human development to member organizations

The workforce crunch is squeezing health systems from every angle, and the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) is betting the fix is not another one-off training day.

In this interview with Physicians Practice, AMGA President and CEO Jerry Penso, M.D., MBA, and Stephen Beeson, M.D., founder of Practicing Excellence, lay out how the two organization’s partnership is bringing AI-powered, app-based human development platform to members.

The goal is to strengthen patient communication, teamwork and leadership while giving busy physicians and care teams practical, in-the-moment coaching they can actually use. For AMGA members, the pitch is straightforward: Build a culture where people grow, feel supported and want to stay, and you start making progress on the problems that keep stacking up, including access, burnout and turnover.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Physicians Practice: Today we’re talking about a strategic partnership you’ve got going. I’ll open it up: What does this entail?

Jerry Penso, M.D., MBA, president and CEO of AMGA: First of all, thank you for having us on today. If you ask AMGA members — and these are medical groups and health systems across the country — what’s top on their list, what are the top issues they’re facing, their challenges? Their No. 1, 2 and 3 are finances, access and workforce. And it’s no accident they’re all interrelated, and probably the root is the workforce issue.

Having an engaged, inspired workforce really helps organizations begin to tackle those challenges. In fact, it’s imperative. Right now, our members are saying their workforce is one of their prime issues, and there’s a war for talent. There aren’t enough primary care physicians, anesthesiologists, radiologists or other physicians — let alone nonprofessionals — to handle the volume and the demand coming into their systems.

So what they need to do, and what the imperative is, is create an environment, a culture, where clinicians want to practice, stay and help the organization deliver great care, and really provide the type of environment where clinicians will want to stay their entire career. So that’s the imperative of why now. Why is AMGA interested in this issue? Because our members are interested, and this is important to them right now. And I’ll let Steve highlight a little bit more on why that is so important to our members.

Stephen Beeson, M.D., founder of Practicing Excellence: Yeah, thanks, Jerry — and thank you, Keith, for having me on. I’m a family medicine physician, born and raised in San Diego, and I’ve spent much of my career in the exam room managing a large patient panel. The 2.0 version of my life has been the application of human development to really allow clinical care teams to soar and to create, as Jerry said, conditions where people say, “Man, I love coming to work.” Yeah, we work hard, but, man, we’re really taking amazing care of patients. We’re deeply collaborative with each other, and working within teams is really revitalizing. And our leaders are doing the things that help us feel seen, heard, appreciated, included, communicated with, cared about — that we matter here.

We believe, and there’s very good evidence, that a human development strategy can allow those behaviors and experiences to manifest. And as Jerry said, the top three issues of finance, access and workforce are all accessible through a really continuous human development strategy. When I founded the company Practicing Excellence, that was the contribution we wanted to be able to make in health care.

I’ve known Jerry for a number of years, and we’ve done some good work together. So we thought we’d bring human development and the amazing convening organization of AMGA, which does such amazing work. We’ve already got 30 partners within AMGA as it is, so we’re excited about the partnership and what the future holds.

Physicians Practice: All right, what makes this the right moment for this partnership?

JP: AMGA members, we’re a trade association, typically look to us for education, convening and advocacy. Because we’re in the Washington, D.C., area, our members have told us they want more from AMGA. They want more than convening and discussing these types of problems. They want solutions, and they want AMGA to help them find the best solutions in the market.

We vet those solutions through a strategic growth committee we created, with specific criteria. Is this an important issue to our members? Are there real outcomes from this partner? Is this partner trusted by AMGA members and already working with many of them? We came up with 10 different criteria, and Practicing Excellence met all of them with flying colors.

So we decided it was right to partner with an organization like Practicing Excellence. We’ll only do so many of these strategic partnerships, and we’re going to do them where it really counts. Where it’s a member issue of high importance, and where we can make a difference. Our members are asking for that sort of guidance, and AMGA is playing the role of facilitator to make sure members with these issues can find the right solutions to their problems.

SB: And concurrently, we’ve found that if you look under the hood of what’s keeping clinical talent right now, it’s not only how the organization has led, how collaborative the teams are, and how purpose-focused they are, so the people providing care can be proud of who they work with and the kind of work they do.

But what we’re also seeing as an emerging priority is that people are selecting and staying at organizations where they have a chance to grow and ascend personally as a result of being part of the organization. It’s now as important as leadership behaviors, meaning, “I have a chance to grow and develop here.”

In my conversations with Jerry and AMGA, and in the work we’re doing in human development, that’s why this is an imperative now, because there’s an imperative for retaining clinical talent, engaging clinical talent and executing outcomes. The time for that is now. So here we are.

Physicians Practice: Let’s get down to brass tacks. “AI-powered human development” can mean a lot of things. In plain terms, what’s different? What will feel different for a physician or a practice leader using this platform versus traditional training?

JP: Let me cover traditional training and why it doesn’t meet the moment, and why this solution is different and unique in the marketplace.

Traditional training might be a half-day or all-day seminar. People have to get out of their offices, out of their practices, where they’re not seeing patients. It’s lectures, PowerPoint, really kind of top-down leadership telling you what to do. That sort of training isn’t working anymore.

What clinicians really want is something that fits into their workflow, that doesn’t take them away from their clinical practice, but can be integrated in the moment into the challenges they’re facing. That’s what Practicing Excellence has really developed. I’ll let Steve talk about some real-world examples where this is being effective.

SB: There are so many incredible impacts of AI on the prospects of human development. A good friend and colleague once said to me: In the past, in the human development space, content was king. Now context is king.

What I mean by that is the learning and development strategies that are deployed have to be personalized to the learner, their role, their experience, their ambitions, their accountabilities, their interests. It has to help them do two things.

First, the learning experience has to help them become contributory to what the organization wants to become. How we are with patients, how we are for each other, how we’re leading, the safety behaviors we’re creating, whatever the behaviors are that allow them to contribute to enterprise goals. Historically, learning has not translated into human behavioral change. It creates lots of learning and certifications and completions, but it doesn’t translate into, “I’m changing what I do for patients, for colleagues and as a leader.” That’s the critical chasm learning has to meet right now.

Second, learning has to help them become contented in their work. When you finish a day as a really effective leader, mobilizing your team, and the team says, “Man, I feel seen, heard and valued here,” that’s a different experience. Or a clinician learns how to interact with a patient and, at the end of the encounter, the patient says, “I’ve never had a physician say these kinds of things to me. You have no idea the impact you’re making.” We know health care needs more of that right now.

Contextualized, personalized, in-the-moment learning, as opposed to going to a classroom miles away, allows you to learn while you’re working, using technology-enabled, AI-personalized, contextualized learning. It’s a really powerful prospect.

And historically, learning has been a cohort, a group, a class. We want to democratize learning so everyone learns, and technology enables that. It allows scalable, personalized, contextualized learning that also maps to key organizational imperatives, and that’s what some of the technology allows the learning experience to become.

JP: Let me just build on that. Steve and I are both physicians. We both trained in the typical physician training mode, “see one, do one, teach one.” You learned from older physicians’ experience. They watched you, taught you, and then you were doing it, and you learned by doing.

That model had its value in its day, but health care has so many more imperatives now, and organizations really need to invest in their physician employees and their physician workforce in different ways. That old way isn’t working anymore. We need a physician workforce that can adapt to the rapidly changing health care environment, and for that you need a new type of tool. That’s where I’m really excited about where Practicing Excellence can fit that need.

Physicians Practice: OK, how will AMGA members actually be able to access this? Is it a member benefit, a discounted add-on, a pilot for certain groups, or something else? What’s the expected adoption path?

Jerry Penso, MD, MBA, President and CEO of AMGA: Let’s start with this. Thirty AMGA members, medical groups and health systems across the country, are already using it. The best way for members to learn what’s working is from each other. They’ll be discussing in their groups: Here are the challenges we’re facing, and here are the solutions we’re finding.

AMGA plays the role of facilitator with our strategic partners. We make sure members are aware that Practicing Excellence is a strategic partner and has been fully vetted by AMGA. Members will work directly with Practicing Excellence on contracting and making sure the product is working well, and they’ll get special discounted rates so they know this is an AMGA partner.

SB: Part of what this partnership is about is speaking to the power of raising the capabilities of your people. That’s what our company is focused on, the application of skill development to raise capability, achieve measurable outcomes in health care, do it at scale, and do it continuously, not episodically, to create learning and continuously improving organizational cultures.

When we meet with organizations, we share the power of human development, the data that comes from it, what’s possible to achieve, what a partnership looks like, and we take them through a discovery process: Do we want to tap a human development strategy to help us achieve our goals?

My personal view is it’s really hard to execute at the 95th percentile on something like patient experience without developing and applying the behaviors that allow that goal to manifest. The catalyst is developing people in a way that creates enrichment, value, contentment, purpose and pride, while also doing the behaviors that move the organization’s metrics. That’s contribution and contentment powered by continuous human development.

JP: Steve and I both have a background in performance improvement, and what’s important there is outcomes. Are you really moving the needle? Are you changing things for clinicians, for their patients, for the organization?

That was one of the criteria our strategic growth committee looked at: Are organizations finding value and real ROI on their investment in solutions like this? And the answer is definitely yes.

SB: In this era of compressed budgets, there’s a lot of discernment about where you apply limited resources to get ROI and measurable outcomes.

When we partner with organizations, a couple foundations have to be in place. First, clarity of intent: What do you want to achieve? Second, how will we measure success? We map organizational learning pathways to a specific goal and track it. We’re not interested in having people learn and apply skills if it’s not rendering enterprise results. Every dollar we spend to help the organization improve has to demonstrate ROI and measurable outcomes. We take that imperative very, very seriously.

JP: One last point. We have our annual conference coming up in April in Las Vegas. Our members gather, and they’re not looking for just dialogue. They’re looking for solutions. What’s working? This is a wonderful opportunity to highlight strategic partners like Practicing Excellence.

Our members will speak for themselves. Here’s what’s working. Here’s the value and ROI, not just in dollars, but in better clinician experience, better retention and better patient experience. So at our annual conference, our members will really highlight: This is what we’re finding, and this is something you should take a good look at.

Physicians Practice: What does this development actually look like in practice? Can you share any concrete examples of a skill or scenario the platform targets for a practice administrator or leader?

SB: There are four domains we build content around, and the domain is a declaration by the organization tied to the first question: What do you want to achieve?

The first domain is patient experience. If that’s the declared intention, we deploy learning pathways and evidence-based skills across the enterprise on behaviors known to transform how patients experience care. If patients feel heard, cared about, listened to and included, there are certain behaviors at all touch points that allow that sentiment to arise.

For example, one of my favorite coaching tips within Practicing Excellence is to close a clinical encounter, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate context, by saying to the patient, “We’re going to be with you every step of the way.” It sounds intuitively simple, but imagine an organization deploying its own ways of expressing that across an enterprise and what that does to how patients experience care. And there are about 100 other simple things we can do that can shape patient experience. So patient experience is one domain.

The second is team engagement, leadership behaviors and team-collaboration behaviors that allow engagement to happen. Engagement maps to retention, discretionary effort and willingness to recommend the organization as a place to work. There are very specific evidence-based leadership skills we can learn and apply to optimize team engagement.

The third is leadership effectiveness. Some organizations want to certify every manager and above on core leader competencies to advance engagement and retention of clinical talent. With technology, we can make that process continuous, not episodic, not pulling them out of work, using microlearning that allows them to learn and apply skills known to advance leadership effectiveness.

The fourth domain is clinical excellence for organizations on the high-reliability journey, safety behaviors, authority gradient reductions, and the domains that manifest high reliability. So we use microlearning applied to a particular organizational intent, using analytics and AI to personalize and contextualize it, and to give tips while you work.

Physicians Practice: We talked a bit about measurement, but let’s nail it down. How are we going to measure success, and how quickly should practices expect to see it? Are you looking at patient experience metrics, engagement or turnover, safety events, teamwork measures, operational outcomes? What are we looking at here?

JP: As I mentioned, workforce is a huge issue for our members, and the fight for talent is real. So number one is turnover. Are physicians and clinicians finding they want to stay at that location, stay with that organization, and have a long, productive career there?

There’s also burnout. Are you decreasing burnout metrics? Many of our members are doing provider satisfaction surveys and provider engagement surveys where they can measure these things. There are other metrics as well, and I’ll let Steve talk about them. Again, one of the reasons we picked Practicing Excellence is they have a proven track record in these and other metrics with organizations.

SB: The results that emerge from an effectively deployed, systemic human development strategy can be breathtaking. We have more than 20 case studies demonstrating quantitative improvement as a result of raising human capability through continuous learning.

As I mentioned, step one is declaring what you want to achieve, patient experience, retention, turnover, well-being, and then building learning pathways to support that goal. A critical step is identifying how we will measure success.

We identify the metric that corresponds to a quantitative proof point for the organizational intent. If team engagement is the goal, then retention, turnover and well-being become the metrics we use to verify we’re achieving that intention. Then we build learning pathways for leaders and team members to turn those dials through consistent human behavior that allows those metrics to move.

We also have robust use analytics. We’re jointly accredited for CME, so participants can accrue continuing medical education through the process. We also want to know: Are they using the platform? We’re proud of our use analytics, how people find value, return, use and participate in learning pathways.

So we have quantitative outcomes mapped to organizational intentions, use analytics, CME hours earned, and then our favorite: qualitative voices of participants. We have tens of thousands of comments within the learning platform, and those are fun to harvest. We report those back to leaders to show what clinicians are doing, committing to and saying as a result of becoming better at the work they do.

JP: I go around and visit health care systems across the country. It’s one of the best parts of my job, and Steve does that as well. Successful organizations have very clear metrics of success. They define what success looks like, and they communicate that throughout the organization.

If part of the success scorecard is really taking care of clinicians, taking care of the workforce, that resonates. And I find organizations that do that are successful in the long term. In addition, they don’t just put the metric on a scorecard. They give clinicians tools to make sure it can happen.

SB: I feel very passionate about this, and I know Jerry does as well: You can’t hold anyone accountable for an outcome without giving them the tools to become successful.

Jerry and I have a history where there were accountabilities for things like patient experience without specific tools to help. I had a chance in that era to coach and develop clinicians who were flagged for needing coaching, and they had no idea what patients were saying about them. It’s frankly cruel to say, “Achieve this and you get this,” without also providing help, support and evidence-based tools in the moment while they do their work.

So they might say, “I have patients coming in demanding antibiotics for viral illness, what do I do?” That’s what we do. We help with those kinds of scenarios so they can learn how to manage them, with quick tips to support that.

Physicians Practice: Practices everywhere are overloaded with “one more tool.” What are you doing to make implementation more lightweight? Workflow fit, time expectations per week, change management, support? How are you making it so this doesn’t become another checkbox?

SB: Physicians Practice, this is probably the most important intention behind founding Practicing Excellence. It has to be enriching to the individual user.

We also found, studying the science of human development, particularly in overwhelmed clinicians, that learning has to occur in the work, minutes at a time. The idea of watching long modules, sitting in a classroom, stepping away from demands of work is no longer an option. So we were deliberate about the design. Seconds to minutes at a time, in the flow of work.

So, “I have a patient demanding an MRI for nonradicular low back pain. I need guidance.” Boom, evidence-based behaviors to help and support you. The clinician learns and applies that and thinks, “That was way better. I wish I would have learned that 10 years ago.” Then they say, “This is helpful. I’ve got a coach in my pocket that allows me to become better at my work and release my burden.”

And a leader struggling with team engagement learns a skill of identifying, recognizing, appreciating and telling stories about how the people they’re leading are contributing to great things. They see their teams feel appreciated and seen, and they think, “I learned and applied something that made me more effective and less overwhelmed and frustrated as a leader.”

So we’re finding it’s in the moment, minutes and seconds at a time, in the work, mapping to the pebbles in their shoes, with continuous support to face the challenges in front of them. We put that together to create a human development journey that helps people become the best version of themselves while mapping to organizational priorities.

Physicians Practice: We’re talking about AI, so there’s got to be a privacy question. A lot of leaders worry about trust and guardrails. What data is the platform using or not using? What privacy, security and governance expectations should member organizations have?

JP: Every one of our organizations is working on AI governance and making sure any solution they use has guardrails, cybersecurity and protections to address intellectual property and privacy concerns. Every AMGA organization takes this seriously and works closely with vendors to make sure safety precautions are in place regarding clinician information and any patient information.

SB: From our standpoint, security is critical. You can’t play in health care unless you have robust protection and security.

We’re well into our SOC 2 certification right now. We work with every technical team to go through their criteria for security and privacy. That’s part of onboarding. We continue to invest in data security and protection of important information, and we have no patient information at all within our ecosystem.

JP: If this product is in 30 organizations, that means it’s been through 30 IT teams or CIOs. They have strict criteria about what’s allowed on their systems. If Practicing Excellence has made it through 30, I can tell you it’s past the bar.

Physicians Practice: AMGA represents a wide range of organizations and settings. How will this partnership scale across different practice sizes and cultures, and what would you say to a skeptical clinician who’s been burned by past training programs?

JP: On the first question, it’s already in 30 AMGA members, organizations of different sizes, locations and structures. Seventy-four percent of our members are now health systems, and health systems are becoming the dominant player in physician employment. They’re looking for solutions like this that will scale across their organizations, whether they’re employed physicians, affiliated physicians, clinicians, and Practicing Excellence has a track record of serving all of those.

As for skeptical clinicians, having been in physician leadership roles within medical groups and health systems, that’s part of your bread and butter. Dealing with skepticism and making sure they don’t see this as just one more initiative that will go away if they keep their heads down.

What you have to do is convince skeptical clinicians this is in their interest, the “what’s in it for me.” Why will this make my life better? Why will this make my practice better? And I think Practicing Excellence has great answers to those questions.

SB: To build on that, we’ve been deliberate that this is a “by clinicians, for clinicians” approach.

Even if an organization declares patient experience as the intention across ambulatory, acute care, primary care, specialty care, there’s role-specific, clinician-to-clinician content that gives credibility. Our hospitalist content is done by hospitalists. We source everything from the evidence. Nothing gets into Practicing Excellence unless it’s evidence-based.

The other powerful mechanism is scale. Historically, learning programs pulled people out of clinical time, so it was hard to get everyone involved. You learn things and hope you apply them later, which, frankly, most of the time doesn’t happen.

This is designed to reinvent that. In the work, while you work, coach in the pocket. Technology allows an organization to develop each and every care team member in a role-specific, contextualized, continuously learning pathway to achieve goals, patient experience, team engagement, leadership effectiveness, using a scalable human development strategy.

I think back to early days at Sharp HealthCare. We had 18,000 employees, and it took us years to get results because of scale. With technology, we can address that and get everyone moving in the same direction.

Physicians Practice: I think those are all the questions I’ve got for you. Is there anything else you want to add, or anything you think I’m overlooking?

JP: I’ll end with one point. There are a lot of good business books out there. One of my favorites is Marshall Goldsmith’s “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” We can’t use solutions from the past to get us where we need to go.

Health care is changing rapidly. The needs of clinicians, the needs of patients, the financing environment. We can’t look at older solutions and say that’s what will get us where we need to go. We need new solutions that will change the evolution of our health care systems.

SB: My final comment is this. I’m grateful to be here, and thank you for allowing us to tell the partnership story.

My strong belief, and certainly part of Practicing Excellence, is that life in health care can still be extraordinary. How we are with patients, how we are with each other, how we lead, and the cultures we create. We believe, with really good evidence, the answer lies in your people, the ability to grow, develop and enrich people so they work together with purposeful impact for patients, and lead so the people they touch ascend.

All of that is accessible, and we want to unleash the power of people to make health care amazing for communities, for patients, and most importantly, for those who have dedicated their lives to this healing profession, which is under quite a bit of duress at the moment.

We’re excited about the future together. I’ll be at a number of AMGA conferences, spending time with Jerry and the team, and I’m excited for the adventures ahead.