AMN Announces Managed Services Agreement with PeaceHealth, Adding to 14 Other Recent Contracts

SAN DIEGO and BELLEVUE, Wash., Jan. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- AMN Healthcare Services, Inc. (NYSE: AHS), the nation's largest healthcare staffing and workforce solutions company, announced that it has entered into a Managed Services Program (MSP) agreement with PeaceHealth to provide nursing and allied contingent healthcare clinical professionals for its six-hospital system that serves communities across Alaska, Washington and Oregon.

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The agreement with PeaceHealth is one of the latest of 15 contracts AMN has been awarded since July of last year when the company announced plans to acquire Arlington, Texas-based Medfinders, creating the largest healthcare managed services provider in the U.S. The MSP agreements executed since the acquisition was announced have a cumulative gross spend under management by AMN of over $40 million. The AMN MSP program is proving to be successful in many healthcare settings including acute care, rehabilitation, and long term acute care facilities.

PeaceHealth operates hospitals, medical groups, a chemical dependency program, health care joint ventures, and other services in Alaska, Washington and Oregon. The contract between AMN and PeaceHealth was signed in late November, and implementation work is now underway.  

Under terms of the agreement, AMN will provide a mix of per diem and travel healthcare professionals to meet PeaceHealth's diverse staffing needs.  

"We look forward to our partnership with AMN in supporting the PeaceHealth vision of delivering safe, evidence-based, compassionate care, every time, every touch," said Carol Aaron, PeaceHealth's Senior Vice President of Culture and People.  

Bob Livonius, AMN's Strategic Workforce Solutions President, said, "We are pleased that PeaceHealth selected us after a very thorough process of evaluating MSP providers. We are proud of our strong reference base of clients who were able to describe their experience with our SingleSource technology, implementation expertise and commitment to meeting quality, fill rate and cost savings objectives.  We are confident we can deliver similar great results to PeaceHealth's Pacific Northwest operations."

As part of the agreement, AMN Healthcare will support PeaceHealth's mission to deliver high continuity of quality care by providing appropriately skilled and credentialed local and travel nursing and allied professionals. By incorporating its Single Source proprietary technology, AMN will help PeaceHealth realize significant cost-savings, standardize and streamline supplemental staffing processes, and capture compliance best practices.

To accomplish these goals, AMN employs the support of a clinical oversight team, proprietary automation and reporting technology, and experienced local and national healthcare recruiters.  AMN will be the primary supplier of supplemental clinical staffing under the agreement, but also manages several subcontractor agencies to ensure that positions are reliably filled with consistent levels of quality.

About AMN Healthcare

AMN Healthcare Services, Inc., headquartered in San Diego, CA, is the nation's largest provider of comprehensive healthcare staffing and workforce solutions.  As the leading provider of travel nurse, per diem (local) nurse, allied and locum tenens (temporary physician) staffing and physician permanent placement services, AMN Healthcare recruits and places healthcare professionals on assignments of variable lengths and in permanent positions with clients throughout the United States. AMN Healthcare is also the nation's largest provider of healthcare managed services programs and recruitment process outsourcing solutions. Settings staffed include acute-care hospitals, government facilities, community health centers and clinics, physician practice groups, and a host of other healthcare settings. AMN Healthcare also provides home healthcare services in select regions. For more information, visit http://www.amnhealthcare.com.

About PeaceHealth

PeaceHealth is a Bellevue, WA-based not-for-profit, Catholic health care system with medical centers, critical access hospitals, medical group clinics and laboratories located in Alaska, Washington and Oregon. Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, PeaceHealth has provided exceptional medicine and compassionate care to Northwest communities for more than a century. During its most recent fiscal year (2010), PeaceHealth provided patient care to these communities through more than 53,000 inpatient admissions, 500,000 outpatient registrations, and 1 million patient encounters by its medical groups. PeaceHealth, with 500 employed physicians and more than 11,500 employees, consistently receives national recognition for innovations in patient-centered care, patient safety, health care technology and cost efficiency. Research published in the June 2008 edition of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety ranked PeaceHealth as one of the top five health care systems in the country for quality of care, and the leading system in the West. PeaceHealth was also named one of America's top 50 best-performing health care systems in a 2009 Thomson Reuters study published by Modern Healthcare magazine. For more information, visit www.peacehealth.org.

SOURCE AMN Healthcare Services, Inc.